“Girl, So Confusing,” femme cool, and resolution over resilience
In summer 2024, the figure of the “rock star”–someone who parties hard, does equally hard drugs, flouts rules of propriety, and lives a big, very spectacularly messy life–returned to the forefront of Anglophone pop culture, this time branded lime green and distinctly femme. As The Guardian writes, “brat – inspired by Charli [XCX]’s most recent album – is more than a name, it’s a lifestyle. It is noughties excess, rave culture. It’s “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter, a strappy white top with no bra”. It’s quintessentially cool.” “Brat” is both the name of Charli XCX’s 2024 album and the “cool” ethos that it evokes. In her Pitchfork review of the album, Meghan Garvey finds that when compared to other “Main Pop Girl[s]…she [Charli] had something they didn’t. She was cool.” Traditionally, “cool” is a gendered performance of knowing disidentification with the mainstream that originated in Black popular culture and was appropriated, along with blues, jazz, and rock, by white men and (ironically) the mainstream music industry. Originally, “cool” referred to a performance of Black masculinity that was “intensely, connected, aware, and able to judge the right action to take in a given circumstance” (hooks 143) — i.e., one that “didn’t believe the hype” (hooks 147) of mainstream white supremacist culture and politics. However, when appropriated by white hipsters, “cool” is reframed into a sort of “ironic detachment” (Winnubst 2) from mainstream white culture, like the quintessential “rebel without a cause.” Philosophers like myself and Robert Gooding-Williams have called that detachment a kind of “skeptical melancholy”–it’s a very modern/Enlightenment and white self-distancing from embodied, material immediacy. Rock stars are cool because they are skeptically detached from mainstream norms of propriety regarding anything from aesthetics to personal health and presentation.
In a 1987 article on “Why Lou Reed Will Always Be Cool,” the Chicago Reader located the Velvet Underground frontman’s eternal coolness in “his unprecedented cynicism, along with his conviction that rock ‘n’ roll could be used as a medium for serious expression without giving up its trashy, offensive vitality…Lou Reed saw through that jive, and that’s Reason Number One why he’s eternally cool.” Skeptical of mainstream norms of, say, sexual propriety, Reed famously hung out with Andy Warhol’s very queer crowd and wrote a song–1969’s “Candy Says”– from the perspective of a trans woman. Charli XCX has cited Reed as an inspiration for brat; from the album’s not so subtle allusion to hard drugs to its song mourning the sudden passing of Charli’s onetime collaborator SOPHIE, the influence is easy to see. Brat gets its rock star cool from, at least in part, this Lou Reed influence.
There’s one important difference between brat’s cool and Lou’s: whereas cool has traditionally been rooted in the performance of masculinity, brat’s cool is distinctly femme. As Dan DiPiero writes, “Charlie XCX’s portrayal of girlhood as damage…us[es] performances of femininity as a critique of normative womanhood, rather than just a celebration of it. That’s a direct debt owed to femme cultures.” Here, “femme” refers to queer subcultural performances of femininity that, by taking it out of the context of cisheterosexuality, offer critical takes on hegemonic femininity, femininities performed otherwise. “Femme” is a way of disidentifying with mainstream femininity. According to DiPiero, “girlhood as damage” is an alternative figuration of femininity to “neoliberal resilience” and “singing about overcoming obstacles,” as featured for example in Katy Perry’s 2024 comeback single “Woman’s World.” Perry’s video depicts her as a sexy cyborg overcoming tired sexist representations of busty women playing to the most stereotypically puerile male gaze; whereas such narratives of gendered resilience dominated the pop charts a decade ago, Perry’s video was broadly panned for having its finger far off the pulse. Laura Snapes described the experience of hearing the song as
In 2024, “Woman’s World”’s popular feminist vibe feels as dated as the Ice Bucket Challenge or Pharrell’s bucket hat. Narratives of feminist resilience are less zeitgeisty in a world where abortion rights and trans rights have eroded, along with both financial and moral support for educational initiatives, curricula, and even books in school libraries that speak to issues like gender equity or the existence of LGBTQ+ people. It’s harder to sell feminine resilience as a cause for celebration when previously-overcome obstacles keep reappearing on the horizon.
Echoing DiPiero, Snapes turns to Charli’s “Girl, So Confusing” as a preferable alternative to “Woman’s World.” Addressed first implicitly and then in the remix explicitly to fellow mid-tier alterna-pop singer Lorde, “Girl” is less about portraying girlhood as damage and more about women negotiating interpersonal workplace conflict. The original version was framed as a song about Charli’s mixed feelings about another woman in her industry; as the second verse puts it, “I think we’re totally different/But opposites do attract.” Contrary to Gharvey’s claim that “the pop feminist discourse of the past decade never seemed to make it to the topic of competition,” there have been fairly widespread awareness of the fact that the music industry likes to pit women artists against one another: in the late 2010s and early 2020s student newspapers at schools like Northeastern University, the University of Virginia, Evanston Township High School, and Paint Branch High School published pieces decrying the media’s tendency to pit women musicians against one another. Remarking that “People say we’re Alike/ They say we’ve got the same Hair,” the song notes, reflects on, and internalizes this particular flavor of music industry workplace sexism. As Gharvey notes, the ambivalence on the album version – “Sometimes I think you might hate me Sometimes I think I might hate you” – displays what we might call a “femme” approach to mainstream pop femininity, as ““a counter…to what the “Relatable Era” demands of artists. Is there a way to be a pop star without being a role model? Can a woman feel empowered without being a girlboss? Can she reject the pose of perma-victim and still make resonant art?” “Girl” doesn’t make a spectacle out of Charli’s overcoming of rampant industry sexism; rather, it uses ambivalence to disidentify with dominant figurations of pop feminist femininity such as the girlboss or the aspirational “hot girl” (i.e., “being unapologetically YOU, having fun, being confident,living YOUR truth,” as Megan Thee Stallion put it).
That ambivalence is expressed both in the lyrical content, and in the song’s verses, which have an unresolved rhythmic ambivalence. The verbal phrases and the musical phrases begin and end at different points. For example, in the beginning of the first verse, the first two verbal phrases end on “like me” and “hate me” – those close complete thoughts. However, the “like” and “hate” fall on the downbeat of the four-bar musical phrases that make up the verse. Just as patriarchy often subjects women to gendered double standards – the purportedly universal masculine norm, and the feminine norm for women – “Girl”’s composition subjects the lyrics to rhythmic double standards – the metric of verbal phrase versus the metric of musical phrase. This rhythmic ambivalence musically represents the affective and emotional content of the lyrics.
Instead of overcoming that tension as Beyoncé and Lady Gaga do in “Telephone,” Charli and Lorde resolve it, both discursively and musically. As Charli tells it, she tried to reach out to Lorde to preemptively touch base before the song’s release; however, Charli forgot to factor in the fact that Lorde’s apps are all on the calendar of her native New Zealand, and a good twelve hours or more ahead of the UK. (Remember, brat means being messy!) They talked, and decided to “work it out on the remix” featuring a guest verse from Lorde. In that verse, the kiwi singer says:
People say we’re alike
They say we’ve got the same hair
It’s you and me on the coin
The industry loves to spend
And when we put this to bed
The internet will go crazy
I’m glad I know how you feel
‘Cause I ride for you, Charli (Charli, Charli)
The first two lines echo Charli’s sense that audiences take she and Lorde as competitors, and the next two add a critical perspective on that feeling: the purported similarity of their profiles is what is depicted “on the coin,” which the music industry “spends” by treating the perceived competition between them as a way to drive virality and engagement (and revenue)…at the obvious expense of both musicians’ mental health. Speculation about the object of the original’s rumination did in fact drive tons of chatter online. The next couplet flips this dynamic on its head, claiming that resolving the beef would create an even bigger spectacle. Perhaps they had in mind the reputed virality of so-called “brand partnerships,” which is the name for two well-known brands, like Nike and Apple, Doritos and Taco Bell, or Addidas and Kanye West joining to create a co-branded product or product line that exhibits features of both brands’ signature styles. Everyone from legacy publications like AdWeek to the corporate blog for brand management platform “The CMO Club” frame as a cutting-edge way to make an ad campaign “go viral.” Resolving their very hyped-up beef in the remix, Charli and Lorde leverage their partnership as pop star brands to create one of 2024’s biggest hits. Both what Jeremy Larson calls a “performative detente” and “two people sincerely clearing the air,” the song became a “watershed moment” in pop music. The Guardian dubbed the song’s “conflict resolution…the year’s most powerful pop moment,” and the song won Popjustice’s British single of the year award and Pitchfork’s readers’ poll for best single of 2024. This language of “resolution” or, as Lorde told Billboard, “mak[ing] it right” makes it clear that these are two people coming together to settle old differences so that they go away, not individuals overcoming ongoing obstacles. In part because it is so fresh and unique in the pop world, this resolution became THEE pop spectacle and critical darling of 2024.
The music also supports this interpretation that “Girl, So Confusing” is about resolution. Whereas the EDM-pop I analyzed in the first edition of Resilience & Melancholy relied primarily on rhythm and timbre to build tension-and-release structures, “Girl, So Confusing” is, perhaps somewhat old-fashionedly, built on a harmonic chord progression. The internet generally agrees that the song cycles through a IV-vi-V progression located mainly in the bass. That’s a major fourth to a minor sixth to a dominant – not exactly a perfect authentic cadence, but it exhibits the general tonal arc of introducing greater dissonance then ending on a more consonant chord. Other songs that use this progression include, notably, Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane.” Instead of building soars that sonically mimic the resilience of the vocal narrative, “Girl, So Confusing” relies instead on tonal harmony’s general idea of resolving dissonance through chord progressions. The music in the “Girl, So Confusing” remix resolves harmonic dissonance in a way that parallels the way the lyrics resolve the interpersonal dissonance between its two vocalists.
Brat disidentifies with the resilient girlboss by resolving differences and damage rather than overcoming it. Like the girlboss, the bratty confused girl uses workplace conflict to generate a spectacle; however, whereas the former transforms that conflict into spectacle through the performance of resilience, the latter transforms it into spectacle through the synergy of a brand partnership. Brat-style synergistic resolution is in no way countercultural – the point was to make the internet go crazy, after all. But, as DiPiero noted, it does represent a vibe shift in the kinds of femininities that pop listeners and social media users find relevant and meaningful as we head into the second quarter of the century. Brat is a rock-star figure that disidentitifes with the resilience of the girlboss to appear cool in a newly femme way. Unlike the 20th century’s “cool girl,” who was cool because she disidentified with traditional femininity through the performance of stereotypically masculine things like drinking beer and watching sports, Brat’s cool comes from its disidentificaiton with “Woman’s World”-style resilient white cishetero femininity.
In this respect, one significant outcome of pop’s 2010s popular feminist takeover is the complete gut rehab of the politics of “cool”: no longer white men using racial disidentification to assert white masculine elitism, brat-style cool uses femme performances of alternative, perhaps racially ambiguous femininities to claim elite cultural capital. Old-school cool certainly still exists (though without its old cachet). The stakes of brat’s performance of cool have just shifted from the mid-20th century mass commodity record industry to the 21st century’s platformed and (at least for most artists) demonetized one. Bratty femme cool has gained traction as a way for a new cultural vanguard to assert its elite status over the merely resilient girl billionaire.