I never saw the Brat wall before it fell. I never saw the wall, the billboards, or any of those slime-green text-stamped surfaces anywhere except alone, online, back when Brat summer colored over everything like a filter, a meme, a tonal saturation. Then it was fall, Brat autumn, when the wall rose again at a sculpture park in rural New York (in an “immersive, open-air installation”), like a bi-fold monument to the release of the Brat remix album. In my bedroom, I listened to a recording of the livestream. In America, there was an election. Now, it’s spring and I’m still inside, 365 PARTYGIRL, and – at least in New York – it feels like the party is over. Forget what it looks like; for me, it never really began.

My friends say I’ve fallen off. That’s not Charli xcx, but Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) on the remix of “I think about it all the time,” which extends the frame of Charli’s fear – the looming question of motherhood – to contain what both artists (all artists) have in common: the universal uncertainties of time and duration. Legacy, if you will, or staying relevant.

The thing about relevancy is that as soon as you get it, you’re losing it. To make art in the public eye is to live in a perpetually iterative loop. You keep doing the same thing and people get bored; you grow, you change, you flop, you get too big or too niche or too fake or too old or too cringe, too wild or too tame or too scrutinized, inexplicably hated or explicably cancelled; you retreat from the spotlight, or you wreck yourself chasing it, or you learn how to care less.

Brat iterates itself like an artist’s life. First there was Brat, then Brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not, then Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat. As Charli tread and retread her own creative ground, we watched the original album’s implicit universe of auto- and meta-fictions spin out into real life: features, collaborations, material self-exposures.

In all its iterations, Brat is about faces and façades. Its coked-up, dissociated, ironic aspect – pathologically lowercase, belligerently casual, I don’t fucking care what you think – belies a sense of abjection, a rough and stilted honesty. With some exceptions, the songs and their remixes come in contrapuntal pairs: interior and exterior, subterranea and surface, how things are and how they appear.

Beneath the drugs and the strobe lights, the sweat and the clout and the swag, this is the beating heart of Charli’s project: You act like a brat when you’re insecure. You’re compensating for the distance between yourself and what or where or who you want to be, for what you feel to be missing in you – for what feels absent, even if that feeling isn’t real, even if it’s not really over, even if you haven’t yet fallen off, or run out of time.

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There is a distinct price to self-exposure. You can only seem so cool to someone who has seen you cry. This is the struggle – especially for the Pop Star, constructed on either untouchability or relatability – that comes with straddling interior and exterior worlds. On Brat and its remixes, Charli makes emotional availability something of a game: She projects an image, then pulls down the screen, or vice versa.

The original-to-remix corollary can feel like a cover-up when it flows from inside out. Where the original version of “Sympathy is a knife” treats the sharp edges of intra-sexual competition, the remix featuring Ariana Grande flips glossy, glibly anthemic. Ariana is kind of cancelled.

You have two options once you get cancelled: You can come back steeled or pathetic, villain or victim. It’s about serving and saving face. It’s a mask, a heel turn. It’s a knife.

It’s safer for guys to play the victim. Matty Healy features with The 1975 on the remix of “I might say something stupid;” the track becomes about his own fall from grace, but more so about the associated guilt, isolation, and self-alienation (Rot in my house in LA / Thinking of giving up everything / Now I’m watching what I say / These interviews are so serious). In solidarity, Charli joins the last chorus, changing the words crucially but slightly, from Don’t worry, it’s pretty common to My friends went through this before / It happens to lots of guys / Medicine makes him a problem. Then, she cuts out, and it’s just Matty for the final (original) line: I’m famous but I’m not quite. Famous enough to have something and lose it; famous enough to say something stupid (something problematic, something misinterpretable, something imperfect or embarrassing or real) and to face the consequences. Brat! It sounds funny to litigate petty questions of fame through an existential magnifying lens – and it is a symptom of privilege – but it’s not that funny if that’s your life.

One of Charli’s best moves is bringing famously divorced Julian Casablancas to the “Mean girls” remix. What began as a bit of a pandering paean to Red Scare (and all the erratic ladies of downtown New York) becomes independently beautiful. Over a slowed-down version of the original’s twitchy keyboard solo, auto-tuned Julian beats himself up like a sad robot. It’s impossible to separate his masochistic devotion (I followed the rules, I took being abused) to an unidentified mean girl (or a girl’s projection of one) from his reputation as a playboy; you find yourself doubting both personae, or wondering which came first.

There’s usually a space between how people present themselves and how they really are. Though “Mean girls” gets gender-bent on the remix, both versions consider self-protection. Consciously or subconsciously, meanness is defensive – a response to perceived hurt based on past hurt, or in anticipation of being hurt. Hurt people hurt people, weak men create hard times, mean boys create mean girls, and so on.

You can choose to see someone, or you can see their face, their surface, their projection. There’s safety in predictive, superficial thinking, in modeling people as opposed to encountering them. Alone, you can deal with the world on your own terms – until the world inevitably comes knocking.

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My friend Andi texted me the Twitch livestream link to Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat. Christian laughed when I told him I think I’m developing empathy. Charlie said It’s all meta-text; she was glad I was writing about Charli.

It’s not always apparent that every work of art is a self-portrait, but much of America’s recent cultural output hews explicitly towards autofiction. In an environment where everything is observed, everything is also observational; in the fractal expansion of virtual perspectives and realities, it really is all meta-text. References direct us – the audience – to notice and examine artists’ relationships, to parasocially enter their worlds while (hopefully) remaining tethered to our own. To understand their work, we are invited to read their lives. (Stars – they’re just like us!)

While references (like musicians and actors and functionally jobless it-girls) take many faces, they’re always a kind of love letter: I admire you, you inspire me, I’m in your cosmos and you’re in mine. They can be coded, implicit, or not exactly flattering, but a shout-out’s a shout-out. Rappers and folk singers do it all the time – so why not a Pop Star? If it’s not so original on Charli’s part, not everything has to be.

“So I” and its remix are shout-outs to the late, great producer-songwriter SOPHIE, who was also Charli’s friend. The original track is itself a near-remix of SOPHIE’s epic, sweeping hyper-ballad “It’s Okay to Cry,” which “So I” references literally and figuratively, lyrically (And I know you always said “It’s okay to cry” / So I know I can cry, I can cry, so I cry) and musically (building at the same pace, with similarly twinkly backing melodies).

On the remix featuring A. G. Cook (another SOPHIE friend and collaborator), the language is artless, ungroomed, a volley of narrated moments and memories – less precise than the original, more detailed, less abstract, more direct. The track ends in an ecstatic breakdown that peaks at 3:16, when the words of the song collapse into a chopped-and-spliced line that doesn’t appear in the transcribed lyrics, but sounds something like (Then you gotta) Think about me if / when you do anyway, as though A. G. and Charli sound-engineered a SOPHIE feature, a channeled dialogue from beyond the grave. Sometimes, it’s important for an artist to put things down on the track – the canvas, the page – to use her art for herself. Not every move has to be legible or rigorous, immediate and fully formed. Not everything is for us listeners, anyway; we don’t really know them; we weren’t there.

You can map someone else’s life onto yours without perfect information or narrative accuracy. Empathy is a kind of forced perspective: You come to understand a version of the feeling, even if it’s not exactly the same. Now I wanna think about all the good times. That’s just how you feel when you lose someone you love.

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Let’s work it out on the remix. Should we iterate again? It’s hard to say things right the first time.

Brat and its remixes are shareable and danceable and fun. The album covers look like memes, so much so that the format has become a meme in and of itself. And like memes, the lyrics are easy to repeat, to insert as explanation or punctuation: Let’s work it out on the remix. Should we do a little key? Should we have a little line? These inane, disposable sound bites stick in your head like firmware. They offer a method of dancing around the real meaning of things, of downplaying the significance of your hand as soon as you’ve played it. Expose yourself, retreat immediately. You can say something without fully saying it; everyone more or less knows what you mean. Memefication dilutes and degrades messages, but, with a little close reading, it does convey them; imperfectly, but en masse and at high speed. In our shut-in, withdrawn, irony-poisoned age, meme sincerity may represent a way out.

Memetic transfer is, in large part, about relation. A conventionally successful linguistic or visual meme serves as a framework you can adopt – something you can use; something you can project onto yourself, onto people you know; a reminder that our perspectives are not entirely separate.

This phenomenon – carefully orchestrated to appear thrown-together – is what drove Brat’s virality, then its oversaturation. We’re tired of saying the things we said last summer. It’s a new year, and history keeps happening. Maybe we’re finally tired of looking at ourselves, at least for a while, until we get tired again of the other thing.

Brat fatigue has everything to do with Brat’s façade – the project’s marketing (a field in which success is, as the market moves, definitionally transient) – and nothing to do with Charli’s art. Not all of the remixes improved upon the originals, but most of them extended and expanded her creative process and self-concept. As a composite, iterative project, Brat was a work-in-progress, an aggregate fragmentation of meaning. It’s not perfect, but it is true. It’s about evolving in public, moving forward: about moving your art forward, and about living that way, too.

Brats are self-centered. This is the defining ethos of our time – or, at least, that of my generation, of our tastes and predilections. Like every trend, cultural myopia arrives in cycles. It’s a cynical attitude designed for brutal, uncertain times, when it’s safer to hole up inside yourself. Empathy exposes you – who you are, what you believe, what you care about, that you want to care at all.

This time around, Charli advertises the space between herself and her image. In doing the same for her friends – famous people, controversial women, cancelled men – she weaves a network of affect that invites us to consider the characters who populate our own lives: to think past surfaces, beyond how things might appear, and to listen.

Myopia is not entirely a bad thing. We have become hypersensitive instruments capable of obsessive self-reflection, no less than surveillance instruments skilled at taking note of one another. With a little projection, we might come to read each other as closely as we read ourselves. We might even be able to talk about it.

Until then – of course I fucking care what you think. I think about it all the time.

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