As you may have heard, President Joe Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race in a letter to the American people last Sunday, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor. But Biden wasn’t the only public figure whose writing would upend the campaign that day. Later the same evening, pop music megastar Charli xcx, whose most recent album is called “BRAT,” tweeted three words that also captivated American political discourse: “kamala IS brat.”
Many cultural commentators had previously observed that “brat summer” was already in full swing, thanks to the album’s massive success. But the tweet seemed to anoint Vice President Harris as a Gen-Z icon, prompting a burst of enthusiasm for her candidacy, particularly among young voters. Much of this took the form of memes and TikTok videos showing Harris against a backdrop that referenced the album’s cover art - which is just the word “brat,” in lowercase black letters, set against a bright green square.
To make sense of this complex pop cultural moment, we turned, as we often do, to Amanda Kehrberg, a Ph.D. candidate at Arizona State University who studies digital culture. She spoke with “The Show’s” Sam Dingman.
Full conversation
AMANDA KEHRBERG: I would say Brat Summer is sort of a, it's like a Venn diagram center between realness and authenticity and messiness and being open and honest. That is so a part still of how to communicate in digital culture and especially how to communicate with Gen Z, but I think we're all still a little afraid of that. Dishonesty can also be messy and playful. And we have to be wary.
SAM DINGMAN: So I guess this sort of leads to the, I was gonna say the red letter story, but I guess it's a black letter story with a green background.
KEHRBERG: Yeah, the green I meant to look up the HTML and the pantone color for that. They workshopped 65 greens, and also what's so funny about that is all of the trend reports have been saying 2024 was blue and then out of nowhere …
DINGMAN: And Charlie was like nope.
KEHRBERG: Of nowhere, slime green it is.
DINGMAN: So, so this, this Kamala is brat thing. It felt like the kind of moment that every politician dreams of, the most zeitgeisty pop star, declaring them to be completely aligned with the zeitgeist. So why did it work so well?
KEHRBERG: A lot of the conversation around Kamala Harris' past primary campaign and its failure kind of hinges on not being authentic enough, like worrying too much about curating your image for public consumption, what they wanted. And so we got this, this weird pivotal moment of this transition between Joe Biden, whose persona is kind of, inextricably linked to a little bit of messiness and some, some gaffes and some, you know …
DINGMAN: Some plagiarism.
KEHRBERG: Just, you know, so, we've also, we're coming out of weeks of the news cycle just kind of focusing in on those gaffes and turning them into a much more negative story than the kind of lovable, says some, you know, wrong dumb things sometimes, you know.
So this was such an interesting paradigm shift in how we see saying dumb things and still finding those people lovable and relatable. It functioned to work as a transition between Biden, but also to transition him out of that media narrative so effortlessly into Kamala Harris, allowing her to take on the positive side of that kind of relatable kind of messy, why we, you know, why people love Joe. And I still don't even know how it worked so well. There's some element about it that is a pushback against mainstream media and how they've been framing the narrative for the prior, say, three, four weeks.
DINGMAN: Oh, that's interesting.
KEHRBERG: I think there was a kind of unsettling about the way Biden was being covered, the way Trump was being covered, and a little bit of a fear about, you know, hey, we've lived through 2016, we've seen …
DINGMAN: A fear on the part of Gen Z?
KEHRBERG: Yeah, I think so. Of just, let's just completely reframe this using our methods, our apps and our edits, and I don't know that I've ever seen a media narrative turned upside down so incredibly quickly.
DINGMAN: It's remarkable and, and to the point you were making about how, you know, if we go just on the kind of high level characteristics of what we associate with Brat, like messiness, sloppiness, the authenticity of that messiness and sloppiness. Those are all the things that people who love Donald Trump praise about him. But like Joe Biden, nobody's saying Donald Trump is brat, at least that I'm aware of.
KEHRBERG: Yeah, yeah, I think, and I think part of that is he is extremely messy, but there is not always a consistent authenticity there. There is just …
DINGMAN: Oh, interesting.
KEHRBERG: I would say there's not like a core narrative there.
DINGMAN: Right, right. Yeah, I mean, I know we're sort of arbitrarily choosing adjectives here, but like for the purpose of a public radio explainer, it almost feels like we could say, you know, if, if it's messy, authentic, playful, then maybe it's that Biden has messy and authentic but not playful.
KEHRBERG: Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.
DINGMAN: Trump has messy and playful but not authentic, and Kamala, it seems to Gen Z, has all three.
KEHRBERG: Yes, which is again really interesting, and I think there is a little bit of Gen Z and just the digital audience being brats to the mainstream media and how this all came about.
DINGMAN: In the spirit of the patron saint of Brat, Charlie XCX, I wrote down some, some lyrics from some of her songs, and I want to put these lyrics to you, and I'm going to ask you to name something in the news of the last week, can be political or not political, that this lyric makes you think of.
All right. The first one is from “Talk Talk”: “We've been talking for months, but never in the same room.”
KEHRBERG: That would be, you know what, I'm going to go with Pelosi and Biden.
DINGMAN: Perfect.
KEHRBERG: It felt like months.
DINGMAN: Perfect answer. So a reference there, of course, to Nancy Pelosi using all of her power to convince Biden to drop out through appeals from outside the room he was in. OK, amazing answer. Next, from “Rewind”: “Sometimes I really think it would be cool to rewind.”
KEHRBERG: This is really ridiculous. I was like, I just want to say me because I miss Blockbuster all the time.
DINGMAN: Blockbuster video?
KEHRBERG: Yeah, and I saw, I've seen like three people with Blockbuster t-shirts in the last month, and you know what, that was the happiest time of my life. Friday, Friday night, going to Blockbuster video.
DINGMAN: Thank you for sharing that, Amanda, and just to join you in that as a fellow, I don't want to assume, but indoor kid. My relationship with the summer was not like let's, let's go out in the fields, and you can tell I didn't spend much time outside because I don't know how to end that sentence.
KEHRBERG: But what do people do in fields?
DINGMAN: Yeah. I don't know because I associated summer with, I'm going to go to Blockbuster. I'm gonna get a stack of DVDs, and I'm gonna watch all of them.
KEHRBERG: Y’all don't understand. You're paralyzed by opportunity. Streaming has given you a cornucopia of options.
DINGMAN: Yeah and this nostalgia for bygone times is how you can tell neither of us is Gen Z.
KEHRBERG: No we are not.
DINGMAN: OK, this last one from “Apple,” very dramatic. “I think the apple's rotten right to the core.”
KEHRBERG: I will say I think that that was the sentiment from just a week ago in the political discourse. I think a lot of people felt not listened to, especially in Gen Z, and the feeling of just malaise and inevitability and not in a good way. And yeah, and I think the Google trends of searches for moving abroad will attest to that.
DINGMAN: OK, well, let's talk about that.
KEHRBERG: Portugal. That's my plan.
