As Charli XCX ascends, 'Brat' summer is a lesson in hype literacy

All these items were the color of fluorescent lettuce, and when my retinas encountered them each at random in real life over this past week, I experienced a tiny frisson of happiness, chased by the dim droop of disappointment. Happy because this was the very same green seen on the cover of Charli XCX’s “Brat,” easily my favorite pop album in years. Disappointed because my eyes had been trained by the hype machine.

I wish I could lighten up, but something about this “Brat” summer we’re living through gets me down — something about our eagerness to replace the seasons of our lives with industry promo cycles, about how contemporary pop fandom feels like a zombie publicity reflex, about hype’s uncanny ability to blot out the thing it’s hyping.

Music is mysterious and real. Hype is a legible illusion. We often use the clarity of the latter to cope with our misunderstandings of the former, and in the case of “Brat,” it involves deploying a profusion of green memes in hopes of expressing a collective affection for an exquisite heap of sweet-and-sour pop songs. Melodically monumental and stylishly sincere, “Brat” is far more worthy of its hype than most pop records, and in turn, Charli XCX fans have boldly dubbed these historic hot months “Brat” summer — as if any single pop album were capable of tossing its lasso around our squirming zeitgeist. The whole thing went extra nuclear on Sunday when the 31-year-old British singer logged onto X and posted, “kamala IS brat,” seemingly endorsing Vice President Harris for our nation’s highest office. I’ve been seeing green on the inside of my eyelids ever since.

Having these songs stuck to the roof of my brain, however, has been no problem. “Brat” is Charli XCX’s sixth studio album in 11 years, and she sounds like a pro in every way. Her lyrics are animated by a certain grown-up party-girl anxiety, but her melodic instincts are still made of titanium, creating rhythmic rushes of deadpan truth-telling. During her semi-ballad, “I Think About It All the Time,” she squints into her future and tries to imagine herself as a mother. Then, on the very next track, “365,” she’s back in the nightclub bathroom, adjusting her neurochemistry while another euphoria beat thumps through the wall. Pop albums rarely exude anything this messy, this detailed, this genuine — which is why hyping her humanity in flattened meme forms feels so cheap.

It wasn’t always this way. Hype used to be a one-directional spell cast from on high, a dark art utilized by the record industry to decouple you from your cash, plain and simple. In 1988, Public Enemy dropped “Don’t Believe the Hype,” instructing us to sniff out hype’s insidiousness and fraudulence, then rise above. But decades later, pop hype has become more difficult to get our heads over, its omnipresence made omnidirectional by the relentless dataflow of social media. For today’s pop singers, stardom requires supplying your audience with meme-friendly artwork and highly communicable snippets of lyrics-music-video-etc. in hopes of mobilizing a volunteer army of digital publicists. Participation has become promo, and everybody’s working for free.

Was it ever thus? Did the act of buying a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt at your local mall in 1994 make you a walking advertisement for Epic/Sony recording artists Rage Against the Machine? Probably. Capitalism has always sucked this way, reducing listeners to customers, limiting experiences to transactions. It still makes Charli XCX uncomfortable, too. “I used to never think about Billboard,” she sings on “Rewind,” a typically zesty “Brat” track in which the singer yearns for simpler times. “But now I’ve started thinking again, wondering ’bout whether I think I deserve commercial success.” There’s a bummer riddle in that. Does buying into “Brat” summer make us complicit in an artist’s spiritual degradation?

Again, I probably need to lighten up, so here’s an idea we could try to accept: What if, instead of siphoning attention away from the music, pop hype simply guides listeners toward it? On her website, Charli XCX is selling beach towels emblazoned with the word “towel,” printed in the “Brat” typeface. If you spot one at the pool this summer, maybe you get into “Brat.” Meanwhile, a recent article from Vogue Business tells us that “Brat” green is this summer’s Barbie pink and that fashion houses and cosmetics companies have adjusted their marketing accordingly. If you see someone wearing green eye shadow, maybe you get into “Brat.” On Sunday night, in response to the “kamala IS brat” post, the X account for Harris’s hours-old presidential campaign changed the color of its banner to “Brat” green. If you decide to participate in the democratic process this year, maybe you get into “Brat.”

And if you get into “Brat,” maybe you eventually figure out that “Brat” summer is an opportunity to improve your hype literacy, reorienting yourself to the direction in whichit truly flows. This music is not meaningful because it has its own beach towel, eye shadow, presidential candidate. This music has its own beach towel, eye shadow, presidential candidate because it’s meaningful.