Field Notes IX - Did you have a 'brat' summer?

Cultural nostalgia vs. political anxiety

An abridged version of this article will appear in the September edition of the Huron Church News.

Welcome back to another volume of Field Notes. Summer 2024, while only half over at the time of writing, has been rich with possibility for the mandate of this column – being the theological rumination on the cultural tides of our context. This summer has contained (thus far) a potent mixture of political anxiety and cultural nostalgia. Being an election year for our neighbours south of the border, we Canadians have watched with concern as pre-election drama has unfolded in the news cycle of the last several weeks. Living in the shadow of a fading empire begs our attention. The economic and geopolitical enmeshment that we as Canadians experience with the United States means that we must contend with the churn of American politics. President Biden’s apparent decline in health and initial refusal to step aside as the Democratic nominee raised alarms in the aftermath of the disastrous June 27^th debate. We watched with incredulity as former-president-turned-convicted-felon Donald Trump survive an assassination attempt and secure the Republican presidential nomination. While on a compressed electoral timeline, we Canadians can expect similar upheaval and competing rhetoric in the upcoming federal election in October. Discontentment and, in some parts of the country, furor with the Liberal Trudeau government is rising across the country and support for Pierre Poilievre’s leadership of the Conservative Party is growing. Political and ideological tensions are high while millions struggle with the cost of living.

How are people coping? Nostalgia and sentimentality about the past are often embraced when anxiety about the present is too much to bear. It’s easy to reminisce about the quaint, comfortable familiarity of a bygone era when the present is scary and the future unknowable. Nostalgia may be pleasant, but it is often dishonest and selective in its memory. It infers our desire to recapture or re-embody the energetic youthfulness of a “time before”, unburdened by whatever mess is unfolding right now. Nostalgia informs trends in fashion, music, film, and television, providing a fun and comforting escape. The 1980s were an object of cultural nostalgia for millennials because there was an attraction to the perceived simplicity of their childhoods, to a time before 9/11, the Iraq War, and the Great Recession. As Gen Z has taken their place as generational trendsetters, that nostalgia has shifted to the 1990s and early 2000s and has been ripening and intensifying through the Summer of 2024.

This turn from anxiety to nostalgia has been exemplified in what has been critically accepted as the album of the summer – Brat by English popstar Charli XCX. A critical and commercial success, Brat’s musical style and marketing aesthetic rely heavily on inspiration from the early 2000s, particularly the clubbing and rave scene of that era. The music is high energy and readily lends itself to TikTok dance crazes, yet the lyrics are filled with yearning, honesty, and desire for the simplicity of the past. Lyrically vacillating between her cocaine-sniffing, cool party girl image and sincerity about the pressures of fame, womanhood, and the feeling of having wasted one’s youth, Charli XCX struck critical and commercial gold while deftly catering to the zeitgeist. The album masterfully combines the party spirit of 20 years ago with the existential concerns of the moment. Let’s examine a smattering of real lyrics from the album.

“When I go to the club, I wanna hear those club classics
Club classics, club, club classics” (Club classics, track no. 2)

Vs.

“Used to burn CDs full of songs I didn't know
Used to sit in my bedroom putting polish on my toes
Recently, I've been thinking 'bout a way simpler time
Sometimes, I really think it would be cool to rewind” (Rewind, track no. 8)

Vs.

“Yeah, it's 2 a.m. and she's out there
In the sheer white dress, wearing last night's makeup
All coquettish in the pictures, with the flash on
Worships Lana Del Rey in her AirPods, yeah

Yeah, she's in her mid-20s, real intelligent
Hedonistic with the gravel, drawing dead eyes
You say she's anorexic, and you heard she likes when people say it
Think you already know her, but you don't” (Mean girls, track no. 13)

vs.

“And they're exactly the same, but they're different now
And I'm so scared I'm missin' out on something
So, we had a conversation on the way home
Should I stop my birth control?
'Cause my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all” (I think about it all the time, track no. 14)

Brat has spawned its own viral meme subculture on social media, known colloquially as “brat summer”. To have a “brat summer” is to lean fully into the brash, confrontational, in-your-face ethos while remaining true to oneself, and presumably taking up the rediscovered fashion cues of the early aughts. I shudder at the thought of the latter. “Brat summer” has even trickled into the political sphere, both in campaigns in the recent UK election and in the forthcoming American election. Following an endorsement from Charli XCX herself, Vice-President Kamala Harris’s staff have co-opted Brat and its virality in a bid for support from young voters.

Yearning for how things “used to be” has been a consistent human attitude, even in Scripture as the wilderness wandering Israelites longed for the cucumbers and melons they ate as slaves in Egypt. The Church today continues this behaviour whenever we get fixated on the golden age of post-WWII Christendom, or the “youth-oriented” liturgical trends of the 1970s-90s. Remembering and reminiscing are not inherently wrong, but they can be detrimental. Preoccupation with the good old days limits our ability to name and appreciate God’s activity in the present. Idolizing a reconstructed past is just as dangerous as speculating about an unknowable future. It can lead to restrictive perceptions of what that future ought to be, or committing to a narrative that leads to self-fulfillment. If all our effort is put into reconstructing a past that can never be returned to, we readily lose sight of the limitless possibility and creativity of what God wills to achieve. The future God promises us in the Kingdom will exceed our fondest memories and wildest imagination – and be the answer to the fear and anxiety we feel about the present. Nostalgia offers fun escapism, but it is not the theological habitus of the transformed, redeemed people of God. Take comfort in the knowledge that the future is in the hands of God, and there’s really no better place to be.