The Week of Brat Summer Will Go Down in Internet History
Jake Tapper looked as flummoxed as everyone else. After a week spent trying to figure out the whys and hows of the assassination attempt against former US president Donald Trump, the CNN anchor was now facing something far more perplexing: why a British pop singer was calling Vice President Kamala Harris a “brat.” As his panel on The Lead tried to explain, he eventually put it together: We’re all brat. “I will aspire to be brat,” Tapper concluded.
So say we all, apparently.
What’s happened in the week since President Joe Biden announced he would not be seeking reelection and tapped his veep, Harris, as his pick for the nomination, the meme-ification of the presidential election in the US has gone from a cautious yellow to a neon, slimelike “Let’s go” green.
Shortly after Biden made his announcement on Sunday, British pop star Charli XCX posted on X that “kamala IS brat” and solidified something that had been percolating for weeks. The internet that had seemed to either feel “meh” about Biden or had been spending its time on the Trump Train or spinning up conspiracies suddenly snapped to attention. The Harris HQ Instagram account embraced the meme. Gays on Fire Island had “Kamala” shirts in the Brat album cover’s lime green before sundown on Sunday.
Brat Summer, though, extends beyond this moment. Like Hot Girl Summer, the meme that sprung up in 2019 around Megan Thee Stallion’s song of the same name, Brat Summer has moved past Charli XCX’s album Brat to become an embodiment of the vibe of the season in 2024. For Charli, it’s about—and this is what Tapper was trying to understand—being a little messy, a little volatile, a little vulnerable. But also honest. It’s about crying in the club, but also about crying over the state of the world in a ridiculous outfit with the top down. It is, in its way, anti-defeatist.
This is the idea of Brat Summer that has been at the edges since Brat dropped in mid-June, and it was woven into the politics of 2024 weeks before Biden announced he was out of the running. Ryan Long, a 22-year-old college student, made a fancam of Harris’ now infamous “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” remarks overlaid with the green Brat cover back in early July. It now has more than 4 million views on X and landed Long in TechCrunch, which quoted him as saying “because of her Venn diagrams quote, Kamala goes viral on gay Twitter every couple of months. She has turned into this, like, psuedo-gay icon.”
Because this can make heads spin in the over-40 crowd (see above), the internet has since been inundated with stories on how Harris’ campaign is embracing the memes and explaining, Hey, this Brat thing is far more introspective than you might expect. All of this is valuable reader service for anyone who might think introspection wasn’t possible in pop music and/or anyone who had never heard Robyn.
Brat Summer, though, is about more than Charli’s idea of brat. Skip past the fancams and Venn diagrams and you’ll remember that Brat broke out in a year saturated with female pop stars. Sabrina Carpenter has everyone singing “Espresso.” Chappell Roan got so big in the last six months that her concert crowds now spill over into adjacent gas stations. After telling the crowd at this summer’s Gov Ball that she turned down an opportunity to play a Pride event at the White House, the Harris campaign is using Roan’s song “Femininominon” as a rallying cry on TikTok. Harris sits atop Beyoncé’s Renaissance horse in one meme, and rumor has it that Queen Bey has given the veep permission to use her song “Freedom” on the campaign trail.
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But in five or 10 years, when this week in Brat Summer is remembered, these individual memes may not come to mind. Instead, it’ll be seen as the time when something broke open. When the vibe on the internet shifted from conspiracy theories and chatter about Silicon Valley bigwigs getting behind Trump to one of pure energy. Conspiracy theories still abound, but so do a bunch of activated Swifties. Under different circumstances this week’s memes would’ve been about Deadpool & Wolverine, or Comic-Con International, or, hell, the Summer Olympics. Instead, social media feeds are awash in a sea of green.
None of this, of course, is a sign that Harris has the youth vote locked, or has reclaimed an internet constituency that had grown bored with Biden. Embracing the memes doesn’t always work—just ask the UK’s Labour party. In the irony-pilled, burned out internet of 2024, the embrace of a little bit of attitude feels like a release valve opening. It could all fizzle out by fall (and backlash already feels like it’s brewing), but this week brat burned bright.
Loose Threads
Michael Bay is reportedly interested in a Skibidi Toilet franchise. Variety reported this week that the director is working with Adam Goodman, the former president of Paramount Pictures, on developing Skibidi Toilet into a movie and/or TV franchise. Yes yes. So sigma.
Hairy J. Blige. Some delightful weirdos online are fascinated by the idea that the logo for the Summer Olympics in Paris looks just a little bit like Mary J. Blige.
J. D. Vance and couches. There’s a lot to unpack here, but the memes have been endless.
Corgi on a skateboard. Just riding down those steps like they’re nothing.
