In the honeymoon period between global lockdown and the January 6th insurrection, BimboTok emerged: an effort to reclaim "bimbo" for a queer, extremely online audience. Bimbos are still blonde, still sexy, but now inexplicably erudite, happy to explain Hegel’s dialectic in Valley Girl Voice. Men (mostly gay PhD candidates and project managers, for some reason) can be bimbos too, or "himbos," and nonbinary folks can be "thembos." A bimbo is “anti-capitalist” and “politically conscious,” Rolling Stone tells us. To identify as one is an act of resistance.
The bimbo self-identification movement, while totally benign, has always struck me as a bit iffy. Besides the dubiousness of conventional attractiveness as a radical act, it seems that essential to the bimbo is some lack of awareness, a certain carefreeness, that’s denatured with conscious performance. Regardless, it’s never been a better time to be an erudite bimbo — our current online moment seems intent on mining profound meaning from the ore of mindlessness, hedonism, and bad taste. The self-proclaimed "lobotomy-chic" are endlessly philosophizing on Substack. Instagram collages tell us hot girls own library cards and suffer from IBS and register to vote or whatever. The internet has been Looking Camp Right In The Eye for five years and counting. The highest-grossing movie of 2023 gave Barbie dolls interiority. And now, Charli XCX's latest album, BRAT, attempts to make "hot girl" club music that speaks truth to power. City sewer slut’s the vibe, famously, but so are meditations on authenticity, art, and stardom.
Charli's music at large has found value in the meaningless and unnatural. Following her mainstream success in the early 2010s, she began working closely with the experimental label PC Music, collaborating with A.G. Cook and EASYFUN, as well as the late SOPHIE. PC Music’s early work was singular in its futuristic, almost accelerationist tendencies. Under their hand, pop music shifts into overdrive: the hooks are more infectious and repetitive, the colors brighter, the lyrics even more campy and ridiculous. Bitches know they can't catch me / cute, sexy and my ride's sporty. PC Music, and its larger umbrella of “hyperpop,” felt undeniably ahead of their time.
After Charli XCX’s brief detour into "main pop girl" territory with Crash in 2022, BRAT represents a return to form. Bringing A.G. Cook and EASYFUN back as main producers, many of the tracks feel reminiscent of past work: the breakdown of album closer "365" in "Visions" from how i'm feeling now, the signature A.G. Cook synths of "So I" in "Warm" from Charli, the bouncy bass of "Rewind" in her 2017 single "Girls Night Out” for XCX World. The tracks cohere into a single vision of the highs and lows of a night out. Fittingly, the strongest moments from this album draw from her underground rave roots a la True Romance, looking to late-aughts club icons like Uffie and Gesaffelstein for inspiration. Traditional techno sounds and hyperpop sensibilities converge to form the record's strongest moments: “Sympathy is a knife," lead single “Von dutch," and "365." These tracks are bright and explosive, equally disorienting and clarity-inducing.
However, the center of the dance floor cannot hold. Now more than ever, Charli makes her personal struggles extremely visible on BRAT, walking a tightrope between ironic detachment and gushing sincerity. "Apple" and "I think about it all the time" look towards two directions of parenthood, while "Girl, so confusing" attempts to reconcile her ambivalent feelings towards other women in the industry. In an interview with Las Culturistas, Charli notes that with BRAT, she began writing lyrics before composing them, ignoring standard rhyme and flow — a departure from her previous work. Despite this, the lyrics on BRAT are inventive and irreverent, unique and economical. Lines from the album have spawned hundreds, thousands, of riffs and variations online. It's a great summer to be a comms intern.
Since the beginning of her career, Charli XCX has been deeply embedded in, and at the whim of, the internet. When traditional music criticism didn't know what to make of her collaborations with PC Music at first, it was online spaces that gave them a cult following. It’s 2024 now, though: music criticism has given hyperpop its flowers, and Charli has effectively circumscribed an entire internet subculture. It's unfortunate, then, that her commentary on the medium feels the least cogent, as exemplified by "Mean girls."
The muse for “Mean girls” is Dasha Nekrasova, actress and co-host of the reactionary podcast Red Scare, adored by one tiny camp of the chronically online and reviled by the other. One would not have to look hard for a list of cancelable offenses from the latter, including but not limited to: gratuitous use of the word "r---d," promoting body fascism, repopularizing 4chan edginess for teen girls, and Zionism (but ironic). Don't worry, Charli has it figured out: “The way you call her problematic / And say it so fanatic / She already knows that you’re obsessed.” (One must imagine Martin Luther similarly obsessed with the Catholic Church, or Upton Sinclair obsessed with the meatpacking industry.) It’s laughably juvenile, but more importantly, a few years behind; Red Scare's cultural exports of Dimes Square and being Catholic hark back to dark days of the Delta variant and Canva infographics about performative allyship. Charli's BimboTok-adjacent motifs of “it girls,” “hot girls,” and being “just a girl,” similarly feel a bit trite after years of online oversaturation.
It’s no coincidence that BRAT, at its worst, feels like an episode of Red Scare: masturbatory and self-aggrandizing, conflating being provocative with being meaningful. “Everything I do is an extension of my art,” Charli writes — which is correct, in the sense that artistic decisions are meticulously explained and narrativized ad nauseum. Whether she's congratulating herself online for name-dropping Voltaire on her Barbie soundtrack cut “Speed Drive," or facetiously-but-not-really telling a crowd of fans "it's hard being ahead…. we’re all ahead because everyone here gets it," or quote-tweeting PopCrave followers disappointed by the album cover that they're so close to understanding it ("keep going"), it's obvious that not only does she have something to say, but what she says will necessarily go over the heads of pop music’s lowest common denominator audiences. This places BRAT in an awkward double-bind: instantly iconic, yet supposedly too esoteric; perfectly capturing the present, yet ahead of its time. The girls that get it, get it, and the girls that don't, don't, but it's honestly unclear if there are any girls who don't.
Perhaps being overly proud of your slightly unorthodox artistic voice isn’t the worst crime out there. We’re in an era where the pop industry has reached full enshittification, where the average star feels engineered solely for profit optimization. We’ve accepted that every pop single will be accompanied by an album of “sped up” and “slowed down” versions purely for manipulating Billboard chart criteria. The largest pop star on the planet has released 34 versions of the same album. For better or worse, being a “stan” now entails more data science than parasocial fervor, an obsession and lust largely replaced with bean-counting over streaming numbers and sales. This enshittified climate even dulls counterculture — after all, "360" is just as useful of a demographic marker for Spotify as "Espresso."
While BRAT brings PC Music's largest names to even bigger heights, it's also a grim reminder of their expiration date: last June, the label announced that they would officially stop releasing new music. BRAT attempts to take PC Music's ideals to their logical conclusion, satirizing our current moment through acceleration and inviting reflection over what constitutes good and bad taste. Charli herself, leading up to BRAT’s release, quotes film director Douglas Sirk: "there is a very short difference between high art and trash, and trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art." As hyperpop’s old guard fades, we’re approaching a point where the genre and subculture becomes subsumed by the present moment, rather than leveraging the present as a reference point (see: Katy Perry in full Arca drag). There is no better time for a serious interrogation of authenticity — what, exactly, do artists and their respective communities owe each other? — and no worse time for its reception.
2025