Brat and the Culture of Addiction

My feelings about brat

I wasn’t a charlixcx fan until brat summer. I didn’t fall in love with brat instantly, but rather, slowly, then all at once.

One day, I was at work and austin texts me about how he’s fallen in love with “girl, so confusing” remix with lorde. I came home to him blasting it and dancing to it, his favorite part being:

“‘Girl, you walk like a bitch’When I was ten, someone said thatAnd it’s just self-defenceUntil you’re building a weaponShe believed my projectionAnd now I totally get it“

I started to listen to more and more, especially because of the sweat tour. I have been a troye sivan fan FOREVER, so it was a good combo for me to fall in love with.

I fell in love with the culture of brat summer, and it really aligned with my mission to feel comfortable and to have fun dancing in public (I’ve been wanting to do this because I feel like it would be so fun and healing!). I grew up watching a lot of british tv, and their rave and club culture is crazzzzzy, so I always dreamed of being in these environments, while feeling always physically and spiritually far from them (does that make sense?)

this is what i yearned for as a teenager

The video

“brat is the soundtrack of today’s cultural regime it is at its core the most explicit articulation what it feels like to be a person in the 21st century in a culture defined by the commodification of the structures of Desire addiction dysphoria and stimulation brat is a display of cultural production in its purest form. This video is not a critique of brat nora glowing review this is an introduction to the conditions that produced it.”

Intellectualizing clubbing music/culture?? One of my favorite things.

Notes:

• Capitalism crashcourse

  • Wage workers sell labor to capitalists so that capitalists don’t work

  • Capitalism made society boom

  • Efficient way to produce commodities

  • “by the 18th century it became a way of life it was a whole logic a framework of social organization that penetrated the subconscious of its participants and the conditions of the material world around them”

  • Instrumental Reasoning

    • Underlying condition for the rules

    • Asks “what is the most efficient way to achieve my goal”

  • Capitalism = instrumental reasoning = exponential growth

  • “all of our cultural effort must go into figuring out what society would look like if it were optimized for growth then we create Norms that fit within this optimized society. you know, we define what it means to be the ideal student the ideal worker the ideal body and anything that falls astray is a deviance that must be corrected and in an insidious final step just as a final Fuck you to God himself we pretend as if this is how it was always actually meant to be. we erase history. we say ‘actually this optimized society that we’ve created was always a part of our human nature we were always meant to exist in the way that capitalism intends for us to exist the fundamental orientation towards profit always underlies capitalism’. Now depending on who’s running things certain patterns emerge wealth and power concentrates itself in the hands of certain groups, you know, white men in the west extracting value and wealth from subaltern Nations women racialized and colonized peoples and of course we get ideologies and modes of social organization that serve to justify this extraction. Racism, patriarchy, colonialism the whole lot.”

    • This isn’t capitalism gone awry, this is it’s building blocks.

“slowly Western economies shifted from economies of production toeconomies of service” 21:51

• info is a commodity

“the center of the the Western economy the access on which the profit motive turns isn’t exactly the wealth generation from commodity production do you know what the highest revenue generating industry in the US is in 2024 Banking and finance”

Romanticism rising out of the enlightenment era

• Retreats into the inner world of feeling

“the economy runs on feeling. stimulation. desire. pleasure. we’re living in what queer theorist Paul B PR calls the Pharmaca pornographic era” 28:02

• explosion of the pharmaceutical & sex research in the 20th centuruy —

  • lots of advertisements for drugs

  • Controlling the body, entering the sense of self, colonizing you

• “we project all of our social categories onto hormones and molecules companies and institutions control and commodify our bodily reactions through algorithms pills and substances in the service of powerful social norms” 30:05

• “modern capitalist institutions enforce and create Norms through representations you know. like, this is what the ideal woman should look like, this is what the ideal man should look like, this is what a happy person looks like, and when we fail to meet these Norms, when we feel feel alienated or trapped by social norms, the system sells us its solution to the problems that it creates. not manly enough? maybe you need testosterone supplements. not womanly enough? perhaps you need an implant in the right place. not happy enough? try an SSRI. we’ve essentially become walking Laboratories of the PPE”

• “today the consumptive cycle mimics the structure of addiction a burger can’t just be a burger anymore companies invest billions of dollars into ensuring that the burger is as chemically addictive as possible a social media platform isn’t just a place to talk the algorithm has to be fine-tuned to ensure the extraction of the maximum amount of stimulation from its user.”

Brat is hedonistic–

• stimulation, immediacy and references addition.

Let’s go Mr. Beast again (our world’s biggest opp)

• Mr. Beast knows what the people want, and he gives it to him

  • = pervert

  • Brand built on stimulation and pleasure (porn)

  • He is a vessel for our collective pleasure

  • it’s not art or entertainment

  • the goal is to “fall in love” mr beast quote

  • fall in love again and again fall in love again and again fall in love again and again fall in love again and again

“bad feelings no longer catalyze art movements and political collectives”

“feelings and substances and the price we pay to get them addiction and substance abuse is a process of self dehumanization substances allow you to chase hyperconcentrated feelings that you would otherwise have to attain through life experience happiness excitement Serenity why pursue human experiences when you can consume all the good parts of it in one pill of course you pay the price addiction.”

~ 46:00

• recession clubbing era ! woot!

• music tastes shifts

  • moody (billie ellish) > recession pop (Chappell roan)

• 2020’s

  • highs of party culture of brat (kinda like the recession clubbing era, but different because consumption is now insane)

“Capitalism has to manage how we respond to our failure to meet these impossible conditions the depressive state that comes with being rendered invisible unloved or unworthy by dominant categories”

• Brat articulates this

• Music pattern = high, low, peak, crash

• “are these songs recession pop bangers about escaping into night life or do they force us to directly confront our Collective condition?”

• Enter a cycle of becoming through consumption, sold to us by capitalism

• list of available selves sit on shelves, so not everyone is able to buy whoever they want to be

  • selfhood reliant on capiltalism

  • selfhood you never get to truly understand

Distance between who you want to be and who you are being told you are.

• dysphoria

• we all experience this in the oppressive systems that we live in

Collective project

• went with the color green for brat to be provocative

• brat describes our collective condition of global dysphoria

  • what if we all brought a new world into existence?

  • trans people say “no”, my body doesn’t have to be what the world is telling it to be.

  • seize the mean of bodily production

Hyper pop

• maximalist sounds, abrasive made catchy (i’ve started to enjoy hyper pop since getting into brat)

• Connection between trans people and hyper pop

  • “the body in hyperpop is refigured neither a commodity nor a fetish but rather a technology an insistence on new conditions an insistence on a self” 1:06:57

Return to authenticity, return to humanhood

• but who is that?? we exist in the context of which we came from, and so does everything we touch and see. Our personal taste? it depends on your socieconmic status and culture.. so

  • everywhere you walk you wear a costume and carry a social history.

• all that we think is authentic and inevitable is a social instrument