Hun, your pop culture is showing

Life imitates art, or maybe just TikTok

It is always humbling to have your internet bubble burst every once in a while. Last week I was having a drink with a friend, and, though they were carefully following the US election and knew much more about Kamala Harris’s policy positions than me, they had never heard of Charli XCX. 

“Charles what sex?” 

“The massive pop star. It girl. Brat summer?”

He stared at me.

“Kamala IS brat…?”

He looked concerned. All of a sudden I felt a bit mad. 

Actually, the way fandom has infiltrated the US election this past month IS mad. The night Kamala Harris was endorsed by President Biden, one of my favourite character comedians, Caitlin Reilly, uploaded a whip-smart sketch imagining a phone call between Kamala and her publicist.

With sickly sweet excitement, the publicist asks: ‘Do you know who Charli X-C-X is?” stressing each syllable. “The first thing I would love for you to do, the first time you give a speech when you get your nomination, is to wear lime green. Oh my god, gay Twitter would lose their minds.”

It was meant to be satire: lampooning the way politicians try to court younger voters through clumsy engagements with pop culture. Obviously, this wouldn’t actually happen. Right?

hicaitlinreilly

A post shared by @hicaitlinreilly

A day later, Charli XCX tweeted: ‘Kamala IS brat’, and Kamala Harris’s X (Twitter) banner changed to lime green with the Brat font: kamala hq. Gay Twitter lost its mind, and soon even the Telegraph and the Economist were publishing articles about how to have a Brat summer and how ‘British party girl Charli XCX was changing the course of US politics.’

And yet this friend – who, yes, has Twitter, is in his mid-30s, likes music and reads the news – was unaware of all of this. Other girlfriends told me the other day of a similar story: they’d spent half an hour explaining Charli XCX to several baffled, 30-something colleagues. 

‘You’re living under a rock!’ we tell these strange people who aren’t chronically online, before the irony hits us with a shudder.

Now that the excitement of watching politics and pop culture collide in such a surreal way has somewhat subsided, I now also feel a little baffled by the whole thing. 

Of course, it’s brilliant that Kamala Harris will – surely – have inspired potential young voters out of political apathy (Vote.org reported a 700% increase in registrations in the 48 hours after Biden stepped down and endorsed Harris, though I’m not sure how much correlation this has with Charli). 

There is a certain synergy, too, between Harris and Brat, which has propelled Charli XCX to wild success after a decade on the fringes of the mainstream, proving that hard work, determination and talent can pay off. Thematically, too, Brat is about vulnerability and imperfection  – the song Girl, You’re So Confusing, about the way the music industry pits women against each other, made me cry the first time I listened to it. Part of Kamala’s appeal is her authenticity: she isn’t afraid to laugh or dance in public. She’s admitted to smoking weed in college, and, unlike Bill Clinton, ‘Yes, I inhaled’. 

But also… one of album’s most quoted lyrics, littered all over Charli’s Instagram, is: ‘Shall we do a little key? Shall we have a little line?” The musician has described the classic Brat girl as  “a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it”, and that the Brat summer starter pack consists of: “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, a strappy white top with no bra”. 

I’m all for a Brat summer, but I don’t necessarily want the potential new President of the United States to be all for a Brat summer.

Perhaps the silliest thing about all of this is the suggestion that an endorsement from a British musician will have any radical effect on the US election. According to Spotify listener figures most of her audience are based in the UK. And in terms of reach, let’s compare her Instagram follower count to Taylor Swift: 5m versus 284m. Perhaps US titan Swift (who in 2023 prompted 35,252 new voter registrations after she urged her followers to vote – the highest number since 2020) could have some sway in a close race. After all, some economists believe that Oprah’s endorsement of Obama may have prompted one million votes in 2007. That said, according to a poll from Harvard Institute of Politics asking 2,100 18-29-year-olds whether they would be more inclined to vote after Taylor Swift asked them to, two thirds responded that it would make no difference.

I’ll leave you with a persuasive quote from Frederick de Boer’s recent Substack: “Many seem intent on remaking a core 2016 mistake: acting as though the Democratic candidate’s job is to become the President of Online rather than the President of the United States, begging Harris to devote her campaign to memes and social media, playing to people like them instead of the middle class white retirees in Wisconsin and Arizona who will actually determine this election.”

This week in links

I’ve been reading Sociopath: A Memoir by Patric Gagne. It is slightly unnerving accessing the inner mind of a self-diagnosed sociopath every night before I go to sleep, but it’s also provided a fascinating debunking of misconceptions around sociopathy and psychopathy. Gagne writes about how working in the music industry became a dangerous hiding place for her worst impulses because, as you’ll know from reading John Niven’s Kill Your Friends, so many sociopaths already work there.

I also enjoyed the Atlantic’s essay on laughter as a transgressive act. The article quotes scholar Kathleen Rowe Karlyn, who says that by laughing in public women reframe themselves as subjects rather than objects, ‘asserting their right to an emotional response that expresses anger, resistance, solidarity, and joy.’ Which is why certain men might feel threatened by Kamala Harris. 

And Anna Leszkiewicz’s thoughtful piece on the offensive contradictions of Virginia Woolf. How much can her cruel and bigoted diary entries be explained, or even excused by, self-hatred? 

I’ve been watching La Chimera, the beautiful Italian Josh O’Connor film set in Eighties Tuscany which came out to rave reviews in May and which is now half price to rent on Amazon Prime Video. I had no idea it was based on a true historical event: the ‘great raid’, when ‘tombaroli’ (tomb raiders) looted Etruscan graves and sold what they found on the black market. It’s about loss, grief, love, politics, masculinity… and is somehow funny too.

And, at sohoplace theatre, an electric one-man performance from Paapa Essiedu in the second of three interconnected plays about race, class and identity: Death of England. Essiedu plays Hackney-based Delroy, whose monologue charts how a traumatic experience of racial profiling turned his life upside down. It's tender, daring, funny, and, despite the title, ultimately uplifting. The improvised audience interaction, tailored to the stuffiness of press night, was particularly amusing. I missed the first starring Thomas Coombes, but I've booked for the third in the trilogy, starring Erin Doherty, who is always brilliant. Tickets 

I’ve been commissioning Guy Kelly on the secrets behind Architectural Digest’s popular YouTube series Open Door. I had no idea how intrusive AD could be, sometimes swapping out a celebrity’s sofa for one of the magazine’s choosing because the perspective isn’t quite right. And their obsession with citrus bowls meant that poor Dakota Johnson, who is allergic to limes, had to square up to piles of them in her kitchen. Oh and some sneaky celebs use AD as perfect advertising for a house sale! 

I can’t stop thinking about this insane Polygon article I stumbled across the other day, about the time when EA Games created (then cancelled) a Jack the Ripper game – from the perspective of the Ripper. The twist: the prostitutes the Ripper was killing were vampires, and so he was doing ‘a good thing’ for London and was actually misunderstood. 

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