“Girl, So Confusing”: Upstate with Charli XCX
Nicolaia Rips on the brat beat.
“I’m like… confused.” A girl in a camouflage hat surveyed the bucolic sculpture park around us. She requested anonymity because she told her boss that her dog was sick (her friend: “I said she should just pretend to vomit!”) in order to be here today. “I live in New York City but I never even knew this place existed. It is beautiful.” But what about brat autumn? The magic phrase unlocked instant gushing, a verbal spillage of, “Oh yeah this is the perfect spot for it.” “The trees? Oh, it’s here. It is brat autumn.”
On a cool Thursday morning in October I woke up, the brattiest girl in my bedroom. For the uninitiated (i.e. my father), the original brat album was so popular it created its own news cycle, presidential campaign, and classification system. It was a summertime phenomenon. How though, would the brat complex weather the seasons? To find out I would be one of hundreds making a pilgrimage to the upstate New York sculpture park Storm King to attend a listening party for Charli XCX’s new remix album .As I put on my fuggs (fake UGGS) I chanted: bratumn. bratumn. Boarding the uptown 6 train I played a game of spot-the-brat (was that woman with unpleasantly green nails headed to her nine-to-five or to Cornwall?) before I started to feel that the other people on the train were playing their own game: spot-clear-indicators-of-a-recession. Disembarking at 42nd street among the throngs of people going places importantly, carrying briefcases and laptops, even buskers with a sense of purpose, I felt grateful that I was reporting on this event because it was, without a doubt, the least employed thing I’ve ever done and I got a degree in creative writing.
The 12:30 Metro North to Beacon was the brat express. Most of the people I spoke to were part of the lucky handful that scored RSVPs on the website, party girls, writers, twinks, casting directors, and much of Brooklyn. The rest: a fleet of reporters tasked with spelling out Charli’s je nais se quois. Some, like Sophie Caldwell, had already written about brat summer… and also “Strega Nona September,” “Princess Di Weather,” and “Meg Ryan Fall.”Gossip propelled the train. Walking to the bathroom my ears were on a swivel: “Were you at Sweat tour?” “We went to Montreal and Miami.” “Was Troye in drag for MSG? He didn’t do drag in Miami!” A man in a mesh shirt shot a Malibu nip out of a small clear bag. “I told my boss I had strep.” A group of people in full leather got on at Tarrytown. Since it was, once again, 12:30 PM, there was mixed messaging on the beverages. Some delicately powered through Celsius and iced coffee (despite the chill), while others opted for harder stuff. An anonymous man told me, “brat is the poppers in my pocket and the vodka in my water bottle.” Leah Perri grimaced as she drank a cocktail of blue gatorade and Titos, “This is how to drink and not be hungover at 29.” Rumors about potential guests amassed. Troye. Addison. Ariana? Fan Mickal Adler mused, “I don’t know who she could get to upstate New York on a Thursday.” The answer: all of us. When asked what brat meant to her, a fan named Anna Pura said emotionally, “brat is being super messy, brat is being super fucked up, not knowing what music is playing and not caring, brat is knowing every song is playing.” I asked her if she was a musician and she said, “No, I’m just a DJ.” A man with a cheap green wig sitting sidesaddle on his head gave me a more analytic answer: “It will be interesting to see the juxtaposition between this serene upstate New York countryside and the craziness of brat.” I asked the photographer who was lurking around if he had any juicy tips or scoops. He said, yeah, that his phone wouldn’t stay charged. No honor among thieves!
Some diehard fans came without confirmation or connection. I sat next to Isabelle Schmidt and Paloma Green, who met on the friendship-making app Kindred. This was the first time they were meeting in person. Neither got RSVP confirmation but they both decided it was worth it to buy a train ticket and hope for the best. Schmidt was even prepared to camp outside. “If I have to stand outside at a Charli XCX event I will. It’s outdoors anyway! I put on some eyeliner and got on the train.” Caín Lima, who got an RSVP that day, told me, “I’m just wondering what we’re going to do outside, under the sun.” As we spoke Cain started to sound confused, clearly building an image of what we were soon to experience. “Sixty degrees, no heels, but drinks…” When we disembarked the train I heard them sigh, “It’s just so… daylight.”We got to Storm King. An envious line-waiter asked me how I got a job that granted me the rarified ability to not wait in line, and I thought well, well, how far we’ve come from the judgemental eyes of Grand Central. Riding high, I made my way to wait in a longer but different line at the “VITAMIN WATER IS BRAT” stand. Shuttles carried concert goers through the sculpture park to an area outfitted with a free-shirt stand (later on the train home I was so dehydrated that I traded my T-shirt for a random girl’s half-drunk Vitamin Water—that’s the brat economy) and food trucks (sliders are brat, mini pizzas are brat, chartreuse drinks are brat and Aperol spritzes are brat). A girl in bug-eyed sunglasses shook her friend, “It’s free! It’s all free!” Her friend cackled, the sugar rush of receiving cake when you’re used to crumbs. Suddenly there it was, among the Alexander Calders and the Louise Bourgeois, a massive sculptural re-creation of the … vinyl, with all the artists featured on it. Created by SPECIAL OFFER, Inc. in collaboration with Charli, the sculpture would be staying at Storm King through the weekend. My friend Sophia Marinelli, who works at SPECIAL OFFER, told me, “I sent it last Thursday as an InDesign file and now it’s 30 feet tall.” People cooed at leaves. Poppers and drones shone in the sunlight.
As the crowd started to work itself up waiting for Charli I was jostled between a boy in back of me dressed as The Dare (“I just love his whole sexy substitute teacher thing”) and a girl in front of me also dressed as The Dare (“What can I wear to work and also this?” The Dare, it turns out). Fall, I saw, was actually very brat. The mothy fur coats taken out of a club context were, shockingly, weather appropriate. The glasses, functional, as it was light outside. The chunky boots, necessary for a forest walk. The Harris-Walz hats, a sign of political engagement for the November election. In the cradle of the sculpture, shadows formed a green caul on our heads.At 4:30 PM Charli emerged in a Penny Lane jacket, which she proceeded to take on and off approximately a billion times. Like Punxsutawney Phil seeing his shadow, the beautiful woman struggling with fall layering is a clear sign of a long winter. Standing on the platform she looked down at us, “I wasn’t planning on talking…” She then described the struggle of narrowing down what a track is, when there are so many versions it could’ve been. This album was deconstructed and then repaired. I think one of the best, and worst, parts of making art today is that the easy dissemination of art indulges the artist’s most obsessive tendencies. Work is never done; it can easily be remixed, remade, released, retracted, ripped up, and redistributed at the glide of a finger. There’s also been so much talk about what brat is—it’s basically created its own classification system—that it’s a canny move to (Vitamin) water it down. … surrenders to an artist obsessed with interpretation, reckoning with her own success. is what she’s convincing herself and us. The choice to have this album event, in the unerring sunlight, clarified. How far can you push something without fundamentally changing what it is? And once something has changed can you ever go back? A girl named Kinley, lying in the sun, told me, “Every winter I’m like I’m going to be so wholesome, but then I’m crumping in the club for Charli. You hear that music… and the body takes over. I think everyone’s on the same page. We can’t go into hiding for winter.” Her friend Jessi ran her fingers through the trampled grass and marveled, “She actually got us to touch grass.”
Though Charli seemed a little confused as to how she ended up here (rumor has it she Blade-d in straight from tour), she capped her set with a declaration, “I think this was really cute. It’s really not close to anything.” And then, staring behind her at her legacy, “This sculpture… .”
