Week of 11/7: The Brat Remix Edition
The Endless Scroll newsletter and its Eric, Eli, Patrick Lyons and Grace Robins Somerville but also still the Endless Scroll newsletter.
When Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat first dropped, I was struck by how much is added to the original songs, for better and for worse. It’s rare that a project like this feels anything more than superfluous, and even rarer for it to feel essential. This week, Eli and I are joined by Grace Robins-Somerville and Patrick Lyons, two wonderful writers and friends of Endless Scroll, to unpack just a few of these new takes on Brat essentials.
Twitter is in disarray (per usual) but can find Grace here, and Patrick here. They each write a blog of their own, and we urge you to read them and subscribe to them. Grace writes Our Band Could Be You Wife, and Patrick runs Inbox Infinity.
“Sympathy is a knife featuring ariana grande”
Eli Enis:
Charli XCX could've taken the easy route and commissioned the greatest producers in contemporary electronic music to reformat her unlikely pop crossover for the hedonistic after-hours clubs she was raised in. Instead, the Brat remix record is an ambitious re-write of its first iteration. Charli and her team took a wrecking ball to almost every song and then rebuilt each one, Lego-like, by using chunks and fragments of their shattered remains. Once constructed, she invited a litany of guests to stop by and check out the new digs. Some sound like they're shifting awkwardly in their chairs (Julian Casablancas, Matty Healy, bladee) while others are right at home in Charli’s post-hyperpop furnishings (Shygirl, bb trickz, Caroline Polachek).
On “Sympathy is a knife,” Ariana Grande sounds like she’s so bewildered by Charli’s brat green palace that she can only stupor around with her mouth agape and marvel. I can’t decide if it’s a testament to the song’s singularity or a revealed flaw in Charli’s curational execution that one of our generation’s most recognizable pop voices sounds totally anonymous on here. Grande’s verse is effectively just another one of Charli’s own reflections in this house of blades; she sounds more like she’s mimicking Charli’s inflections than flexing her own flair. Moreover, none of the knives in these superstars' backs are as lethal as the ones in Charli’s original, when she was bemoaning the stabs of inferiority that pricked her in the presence of her more successful peers. Here, it’s the far-off possibility that her newfound mega-stardom might wane that pierces her flesh during moments of existential reflection. Oh, the agony!
Grande’s humblebrags about being “so pretty they think it must be fake” would tip this over the edge of self-indulgent celebrity victimhood if the song itself wasn’t so damn charismatic. “It’s a knife” became the album cycle’s latest memetic phrase thanks to Charli’s brilliant refurbishing of the V1 hook, which dices up a few words from the original and gives the central idea an entirely different melodic mouthfeel on V2. Grande finally dares to express herself during the second go-around of the chorus, drizzling her accented harmonies without overshadowing Charli’s own falsetto chirps. If it’s truly “a knife when you’re finally on top,” then this remix is a veritable slasher flick of Brat’s enduring charms.
“I think about it all the time featuring bon iver”
Grace Robins-Somerville:
I recently traveled to Chicago for a friend’s wedding. I have other married friends, but they were already married when I met them. This was the first time I’ve watched a friend and a peer—one that I met when we were teenagers—reach this milestone.
My friends are starting to collect markers of Real Adulthood—moving in with their partners, getting married, having kids, turning entry level jobs and side hustles into careers. I’m just a few weeks shy of 26 (goodbye, mom and dad’s health insurance!) Most of these are decisions that I’d feel nowhere near ready to make if they were presented to me.
When Charli XCX revealed the feature list for the brat remix album, Bon Iver seemed like an odd choice—in general and for this particular song. Perhaps it was reductive of me to think that the guest artist for this remix should be another woman. Generally speaking, a man working in a creative industry can become a parent and have his career and public image stay the same as it was before—a luxury that most female artists don't get to have.
Hearing the original version of “i think about it all the time” inspired me to write an essay for Paste about “baby fever anthems,” a term I used somewhat facetiously. I wrote it while I was staying with my boyfriend’s family. When his mother (or my own) hints at a desire for grandkids (with the obligatory “no pressure,” either literal or unspoken), I offer a canned response: “It’ll happen someday, just not anytime soon!” If I’m feeling cheeky: “I’ll have a baby after I sell my first book.” It’s mostly a joke, mostly arbitrary, just like me telling my best friend that I can’t even think about getting married until I have bylines in x, y, and z publications. Pretending I can plan these things and barter with the universe for them—“earning” a domestic or personal milestone by proving myself with a professional one—lets me trick myself into momentarily believing that I’m in control; that if I finish my MFA, evolve into a more emotionally and financially stable version of myself, get a book deal, have a baby, maintain my friendships, and do all that while my parents (late 60s and early 70s) are still alive, everything will be okay.
When I expressed concerns to my sister a few months ago, she replied, “It’s not the fucking 50s.” And sure, today it’s a hell of a lot easier for a woman to have a career (particularly a career in the arts) AND a family, but there’s a reason women—even ones as successful as Charli XCX—still have to wonder whether or not the world will continue to care about what they have to say if they become mothers. On the remix, the stakes are heightened even more now that Charli and her fiancée George Daniel are more successful than they’ve ever been. “Me and George sit down and try to plan for our future,” Charli talk-sings on the remix, “But there’s so much guilt involved when we stop working / ‘Cause you’re not supposed to stop when things start working.”
And what I’m about to say isn’t at all novel, but I see a world crumbling in the hands of a few extremely powerful people who are setting oceans on fire and massacring tens of thousands of children in an ongoing genocide funded by my tax dollars. In the state where I currently live, entire towns are getting wiped out by floods, women and girls are forced into childbearing because they missed a 12-week window. I look around at all of that and think, what business do I have bringing someone new into hell on earth? How could any parent possibly prepare for this? And what’s a fucking pop song gonna do about it? Who among us isn’t scared to run out of time?
By the time my grandmother was my age, she had four kids and 2/3s of her life left. I have no kids and 2/3s of a master’s degree and no idea how much more of my life is ahead of me, though I’d like to stick around for a while. I have a small, stupid list of accomplishments I’m prepared to rattle off if I need to make myself seem impressive to the people at this wedding who I haven’t seen since college. I have one hand in my boyfriend’s and one in my best friend’s as we watch two of our friends take a vow that will bind them together in the eyes of g-d and the law. I have little faith in institutions like marriage to save any of us, but the love I feel in that moment could fill the whole room—love for my partner, for the friends I’ve traveled all this way to be with, for all that I’ve seen these people create and all that they’ve yet to create, for a future that feels impossible more often than not. We need more than just love, but that doesn’t negate how badly we need the love that we have. I have Charli XCX interpolating Bon Iver interpolating Bonnie Raitt stuck in my head—“I found love, baby.”
“So i featuring a.g. cook”
Patrick Lyons:
The image of SOPHIE that sticks with me is one provided by someone who only met her briefly. Vince Staples has been the 21st Century’s foremost cultural-critic-as-artist since his teenage years, and his subsequent music, tweets, interviews, and inevitable film career have only strengthened that reputation. When news of SOPHIE’s sudden, shocking death surfaced in January 2021, her many collaborators offered heartfelt tributes attesting to her genius, cultural impact, and bravery as a trans woman. But Staples, whose violent Long Beach upbringing colors everything he does, memorialized SOPHIE as the ultimate badass.
The original version of “So I” is one of a handful of methodical, introspective songs on Brat that temper the album’s hedonistic reputation. Charli XCX, and to an even greater degree, her go-to producer A.G. Cook, had professional and personal relationships with SOPHIE that dwarf Staples’. Their drumless elegy mentions SOPHIE’s exacting ear (“When I make songs, I remember/Things you'd suggest, ‘Make it faster’”) but mostly aims to humanize this purveyor of alien sounds who spent the first half of her career obscuring her identity.
Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat widens the album’s gap between bangers and atmospheric soul-searchers. The clubbiest songs are ratcheted up a notch (or three); The 1975 and Bon Iver are called in to sadboy-ify the already pensive “I might say something stupid” and “I think about it all the time,” respectively. “So I” is the only thing that goes against type.
The original references SOPHIE’s “It’s Okay To Cry,” the emotive 2017 song on which she first unveiled both her singing voice and (via the iconic video) her face. The remix worships at the altar of the abrasive sugar-rushes that first made SOPHIE a household name. A.G., who brought SOPHIE into the PC Music fold in 2013, is in his fucking bag. He guides it from a chirpy-but-sparse intro all the way to a cacophonous climax, tastefully splicing in recognizable presets from SOPHIE’s toolkit.
Charli first worked with SOPHIE on 2016’s Vroom Vroom EP. At the time, she was in the midst of one of the many wilderness periods that defined her pre-Brat years, this one sparked by her awkwardly rock-adjacent sophomore album, Sucker. Vroom Vroom was initially panned, but in the eight years since, it has revealed itself as the skeleton key that opened the door for her ensuing career.
Charli’s portrayal isn’t as austere as Staples’, but her memory of an SXSW performance with SOPHIE paints the late artist as the personification of avant-garde confidence:
First time I ever felt alive on stage
In Texas, in matching latex
That's as cool as I'm ever gonna feel
“Everything is romantic featuring caroline polachek”
Eric Bennett:
My favorite songs on Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat are the ones that help the project feel like an epilogue. You see this in songs like “Rewind.” A song about a tepid yearning for commercial success is refracted through the dark glass of sudden fame. On its remix, Charli and Bladee are covered in shadow, musing about how new money has rotted them from the inside out. We rarely get the reaction to sudden fame so quickly and so effectively.
This effect is most successfully captured on the redux of “Everything is romantic.” In its original form the song is wide-eyed and tumultuous, a roll of heat lightning at the album’s core. Charli is basking in the sun and the love of her friends, taking in luxury and debauchery in equal measure. In its reimagined form, summer has ended and so much has changed that Charli is now too busy to be the center of the song. Vacation has ended, and she’s halfway across the world. It’s cinematic, the way the song is framed. Caroline is roaming the rainy streets of London when she gets a call from Charli, who needs someone to validate her feelings of overwork. Caroline is there to hold those feelings, and offers the cutting insight “It’s like you're living the dream but not living your life. Polachek’s melismatic vocals cradle Charli’s familiar, robotic chant of “fall in love again and again.”
Once the line clicks, the focus shifts back to Caroline still free-bleeding in the rain, and all the romantic things of the original become their autumnal analogs. I keep thinking about “Summer Babe (Winter Version),” but just its title, not the song itself, to describe the process. Neon orange drinks become cheap wine, leather leather-tanned skin has become enrobed in black silk. The beautiful island of Capri is no longer in the distance, now there are only church bells. The accouterment has changed, but the message remains the same. Look for romance in anything, and you can find it. Charli asks Caroline “Everything’s still romantic, right?” at the end of their call. The answer, no matter what, can be yes.