When Charli XCX sent her now-legendary tweet declaring that “kamala IS brat,” shortly after Kamala Harris was anointed the heir apparent to the Democratic presidential nomination, she wasn’t trying to be political, she was trying to be cute.
In an interview with New York Magazine published Monday, the British singer revealed that she was in her pool at home in Los Angeles, waiting for lunch to be ready, and tossed out what she thought would be “something positive and lighthearted.”
It became something more than that, to say the least. As Harris’s campaign embraced the co-sign, immediately turning the banner on their social media rapid response page Kamala HQ slime green, posting remixes of the candidate set to Charli’s music on TikTok, the world was also treated to elder generations fumbling to define what “brat” means, often on live TV. It’s been a lot to digest for the artist, who has been planning the rollout of her latest album, brat, for over a year, referring to it as “the campaign.” The main idea of that meticulously crafted campaign? Make it look spontaneous. Sunday morning political talk show discussions of her music were decidedly not part of the campaign.
“Did I think me talking about being a messy bitch and, like, partying and needing a Bic lighter and a pack of Marlboro Lights would end up on CNN? No,” she said. Still, she’s rolling with it—that is, after all, the brat way of life.
“To be on the right side of democracy, the right side of women’s rights, is hugely important to me,” she added. “I’m happy to help to prevent democracy from failing forever.”
As a Brit, Charli can’t vote in the election, said that she doesn’t see herself as “a political artist,” and doesn’t want to be. “I’m not Bob Dylan, and I’ve never pretended to be.”
Charli is doing Charli, which means reminders that she’s “partying all the time” and an insistence that “I’m messy. I’m messy.” She’s more about the party than party politics. “Everything I do in my life feeds back into my art,” she said. “Everything I say, wear, think, enjoy—it all funnels back into my art. Politics doesn’t feed my art.”
But as the world has seen, her art is feeding politics, and brat’s brat.
