Year of the Girlypops or Charli/Chappell ’24
A glance back at Brat Summer, from the winter of our discontent
Like almost everything else, pop music was established as a man’s man’s man’s man’s world.
As you may be aware, women have only been allowed to vote for a little over a hundred years, and the Equal Rights Amendment (“equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”) proved too controversial to ratify in its century of existence. They’ve had to fight harder to participate, as surely as snow being cold and rain being wet, and pop was no exception. A few made it early on behind the scenes (Sylvia Robinson, Estelle Axton, Florence Greenberg). But the gatekeeping was such that Brill Building vet Carole King really was the first major instance, only a little over 50 years ago, of a prominent female artist singing her own material plainly, rather than giving in to the established vocal binary of “angelic” or “brassy.”
Efforts to power were knocked back throughout the ‘70s. Bob Dylan actually did either fall asleep or pretend to fall asleep to Court and Spark at the Asylum listening party, a contender for greatest-ever album Joni Mitchell had spent a year conceiving while Dylan just dicked through Planet Waves. She outsold Dylan, if not at Tapestry levels — but, like Carly Simon, both Mitchell and King upended their supplicative, stereotype-flirting images without surrendering them completely.
When Debbie Harry and Chrissie Hynde shattered these stereotypes, by playing into and casting them off respectively, they found themselves well-outsold by the self-pity party of The Wall, a blockbuster LP by a quartet of male superstars who, individually speaking, were each among the least interesting people in the industry. Only 40 years ago did someone calling herself Madonna break out of this corroded cage.
(Here the cishet white dude writing this piece pauses to acknowledge a few holes in his pocket history. Millie Jackson. Bonnie Raitt. Kate Bush. Bette, Cher. B-52’s, Go-Gos. Tina Turner. Diana and Aretha. The subtextual politics of ABBA — not to mention fucking Fleetwood Mac. Joan Armatrading. Rosanne Cash vs. Carlene Carter. Grace Jones. Laurie Anderson and Yoko Ono’s fluke hits. Women of every color and stripe making cathartic cracks in that glass ceiling. Nevertheless, he persists…)
Clutching her own image between her immaculate teeth (if not gym-strengthened thighs), Madonna seized the stereotypists by the balls, and twisted them into submission. Like Michael Jackson, her success was so seismic she seemed to transcend her medium, and however collaborative her art ultimately was, you didn’t have to dig deep to tell that she ran it all herself. To mix metaphors, she rode onto the pop scene proudly nude on a Trojan horse. She modified and amplified a thin, “disco dolly” (pioneering feminist and occasional unwitting sexist Christgau’s phrase) vocal style, turning it both ironic and empowering. She was a skillful, provocative writer — whether about consumerism, abortion or religion, the latter of which compelled her toward the thrilling joys of heresy. She was a triple-threat performer who curated her own shows, her own photoshoots, her own image entirely.
For nearly 20 years, she remained unstoppable, even as she allowed numerous eccentricities to flourish unchecked. And for the same amount of time, there wasn’t really another Madonna, though via brilliant rap artists like Roxanne Shante and Queen Latifah, and brilliant rock artists like Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney, the presence of women in pop music complicated and intensified.
Sometimes it was difficult to ascertain where a brilliant female performer’s liberation began and her oppression ended (e.g. Aaliyah). But the point is, it was a long way up, down or sideways to Britney Spears, the institution and survivor who can best be pinpointed as kicking off the current century’s concept of the Pop Queen. It’s less a testament to Spears’ own limitations than our culture’s that her assertive sexuality was greeted with hostility, yet her apparent lack of autonomy was turned against her, too.
Spears’ saga is a long and twisted one I won’t even try to recap here — she has her own eras worth reexamining, but right now she clearly wants to do her own thing after experiencing a long loss of personal autonomy, the degree of which few pop commodities have ever known. What matters is what she instigated: she was the advent of the still-active era where the prefab sounds Madonna once so controversially embraced have swallowed the radio, and where women are no longer the decisive pop minority. For all her cruel reduction to pure puppetry, Spears proved a spark for both Lady Gaga and Rihanna, crucial modern pop artists who each emerged from a teenpop template Spears spearheaded. However visionary and independent, even those performers who broke her mold acknowledged the debt they owed her — including the idiosyncratic ‘90’s bitch’ Charli XCX.
Charli has a sense of history partially compatible with rockist culture. She’s raved about The Velvet Underground & Nico like she’s Brian Eno or David Bowie, and sampled the “DMT-addled era” Todd Rundgren on an early mixtape. But when she went on Jimmy Fallon she dubbed “…Baby One More Time” the greatest song of all time. This gives us a sense of her aesthetic. Charli is both a hitmaker — her sense of a good hook is unrelentingly surefire — and a soundscapist, drawn to palettes of sonic components not otherwise found in nature, and collaborators who favor same. The most famous of these is PC Music majordomo A.G. Cook, repeatedly name-dropped on her wildly successful 2024 release brat. Ten years ago, Charli was the good part of cultural mistake Iggy Azaelea’s “Fancy,” but she couldn’t parlay that or “Boom Clap” into 1989 (or even Pure Heroine) levels of chart success.
VIDEO: Charli XCX performs “360” on SNL
It was only through her subsequent embrace of the advancements of PC’s innovations, including those of the late great SOPHIE, that Charli found the right setting for her voice. Her music had been uncommonly adventurous from the opening strains of “Nuclear Seasons”. But PC Music’s music was devoted to not only breaking but fucking with molds — melting them down, smashing them then haphazardly reconstructing them, setting them on fire then reconstituting the ashes. Meanwhile, 2015 began to see the stripping away of the more dated and cheap-sounding metallic edges of earlier 21st century pop, smoothing it out and brightening its twisted corners in a manner both borrowed from and then donated back to hip-hop — in fact, the two genres are often nearly inextricable today. But PC Music recontextualized “dated” sounds so relentlessly and ingeniously they became thrillingly nouveau.
Of course, the bestselling pop album of 2015 was by Adele — who is a lot better an artist than, say, Josh Groban or Sara Bareilles, but whose numbers surely include diehards of both. The actual best (white) pop album of the year Taylor Swift consolidated her dominance was self-sabotager Grimes’ remarkable Art Angels. The rise of trap, and the recession of ‘00s indie rock, spoke to an increasing consensus toward the synthetic and atmospheric, and while it remains polarizing, gestures toward the avant-garde like Yeezus proved influential (Fiona Apple, who does everything she can to not be classified as pop, had similar things on her mind with The Idler Wheel). On the way to abandoning her next album, a habit of Charli’s throughout her major-label tenure, she leaned headfirst into her PC-reignited taste for the experimental, and self-released the uncompromising Vroom Vroom EP.
In lieu of a follow-up to Sucker, Charli dropped two rapturous mixtapes in 2017— Number 1 Angel and Pop 2. Blissfully ethereal, their circuitous structures and stellar array of features (Cupcakke, Caroline Polachek, Tove Lo, Kim Petras, Carly Rae Jepsen) were but the most obvious treasures in a dazzling jewelry box of ideas. Most pop, Black or white, rapped or sung, existed in this otherworldly sonic space in 2017, and while Charli had clearly mastered it, these mixtapes weren’t concerned with the unassailable hooks of yore. Her aim was to transform the ennui or despair a so-the-fuck-what hedonistic lifestyle might yield into the most luxurious musical therapy. Here was an art-pop far more aesthetically satisfying than Lady Gaga’s chaotic conception, and while Gaga hid in genres and movies, Charli cut three more terrific albums which stalled on their way to the top of our pops.
As such, brat felt like it came out of nowhere. Sure, she’d never really gone away — steady collab or soundtrack work, two or more great singles every year, co-headlining Coachella in 2023. But Charli still seemed destined to always be the bridesmaid who fucked off with a pilfered bottle and a few donated pills, plus maybe someone else’s boy or girlfriend, shortly before the bouquet got tossed. Perpetually in search of something to flatter a high between headphones, I dipped a toe back into her canon in January without being aware of her new moves, with my streaming service of choice suggesting a couple of unfamiliar names as side dishes: a slinky cipher called Sabrina Carpenter, and a far more striking and original entity called Chappell Roan. I felt little affection for lead single “Von Dutch”, but the effervescent and “so Julia” (Fox???) “360” was too sui generis not to admire.
Mistakenly thinking brat melodically stingy on my first go-through — when in fact it’s rhythmically adventurous, texturally strategic and lyrically fathoms deep — I was shocked when the little album with the deliberately horrible cover became a massive success. Charli always did well in the UK, but this country is still the best gauge for what the world is watching. Part of the magic trick was how much more naturally Charli exists in the background of her own work — she has a look, but where many pop queens lead with their image, Charli’s music works the other way. (The covers of all her old albums, every one of which depicts her, had been changed to single-hue squares with brat-font titles on streaming services). There was nothing thirsty or strategic about how brat came on; it just was, and by chance, Charli was finally the icon everyone within earshot was hungry for.
Armed with little more than a wand, a rabbit and an outlandish “Cyndi Lauper meets kabuki” look, 2024’s other great magician both compounded and illuminated Charli’s achievements. It’s nearly impossible to suss out all the influences from which Midwest princess Chappell Roan concocted her stylistically derivative, yet somehow wholly unique, cocktail. But similar to Charli, her ultimate breakthrough, after years of toiling if not slumming in the lower reaches of the pop game, came the moment she decided to stop giving a shit and be herself. As always, the secret ingredient was the right producer, in this case Olivia Rodrigo wiz Dan Nigro. But, as everyone in the know knows, the kingdom key to Chappell’s reign doesn’t lie in the endlessly clever and highly dependable music but the lyrics, which untangle knotty queer relationships with wit and a perfect rejection of convention.
VIDEO: Chappell Roan “Good Luck, Babe!”
It’s wild, when wandering sadly amid all of Kamala’s spent advantages, to recall Charli’s flawlessly ambiguous “kamala IS brat” tweet, and wonder if Charli herself might have had some better shot at coalition consolidation. It’s hard to argue that Harris met an uphill battle with shrewd aplomb, and harder to argue that she occupies a demographic space U.S. voters have still not proven prepared to accept in a president. Yet conversely, as far as I can tell, the main reason Chappell Roan ended up the femininomenon of the year is absolutely because she foregrounded her identity, in a way that galvanized pop undecideds desperate to feel represented. “Pink Pony Club” has this surge of Broadway-kitsch identity seizure, or the sheer queer thirst in “Red Wine Supernova,” the horny malaise of “Casual,” or the shame-free triumph of “Good Luck Babe” — millions were waiting to belt along to these anthems.
What’s similarly remarkable is that, in January, 2024 was shaping up to be the season of the dicks, after many years of male scarcity in the upper reaches of the charts. Weeping willow Noah Kahan bringing back stomp clap and hey; demi-Post Malone Jack Harlow (“he looks like he doesn’t have a publicist, or a shower”) sleeping through his priapism; beat after beat of bleak throwback rap; all those country Lukes and Zachs and the unstoppable Morgan Wallen, beloved of right-wingers for some reason. So many 2024 hits came in a lower register: “Beautiful Things,” “Lose Control,” “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” “Too Sweet.” It was like a cosmic overkill for Barbie unduly insulting Pavement. The pop spectacle of the year was the streaming age’s first real hip-hop feud, with Kendrick’s victory so decisive and masterful, the male toxicity it carried in trace amounts was obscured by his target’s.
At the same time, major fixtures of the pop queen circuit were faltering strangely. Twin juggernauts Taylor and Beyoncé dropped projects so eccentric in their ambition, responses were unexpectedly muted, though Taylor’s hubristic misstep still sold zillions, and those who gave Cowboy Carter the time recognized its genius. Ariana Grande tried to pull a Renaissance and missed; Gracie Abrams wrote some good songs for a nepo baby, but one of my friends confused her with Maggie Rogers just yesterday; nobody remembers that Dua Lipa put an album out. SZA lingered over the year like it’s 1989 in 2015, and there were solid one-shots by Tyla, Flo Milli, Addison Rae, Tate McRae, the indie-rooted Laufey, and a victory-lapse Olivia. Also, the public is hipping to Doechii being the best artist on the planet. But contra assault apologist Katy Perry, pop is no longer decisively a woman’s world.
So 2024 being the Year of the Queer Girlypop comes down to four figures: Charli, Chappell, Billie and “last straight woman”/former Olivia muse Sabrina Carpenter. I’ll quote my bi-icon amigx Claire, who till 2024 mostly stuck to rap, and who still has a package to pick up: “The queer folks and girlies needed hope and fun and light; Charli and Chappell delivered. They brought joy and color while acknowledging we’re still real fuckin’ sad about things – ‘why I wanna buy a gun, why I wanna shoot myself’. They celebrated being a woman and, in Chappell’s case, being queer in a time when these things feel like disadvantages societally and politically (though lol, when haven’t they). Charli dared to say, ‘fuck it, let’s do some coke and party all night because who knows what’s going to happen tomorrow’, and Chappell dared to say ‘I top girls, you’re a lesbian whether you wanna accept it or not,’ and we needed that.”
Claire acknowledges Charli and Chappell’s whiteness, thinness, and prettiness. But their branding was exceptional, and speaks to the value of blurring the line between branding and being yourself – an unexplored tactic from the person who this summer seemed like she might be America’s first female president. I don’t know if I’ve ever encountered a more diverse group of people in my life so affected by a single artist as they were by Chappell Roan. Meanwhile, Billie Eilish continued to unify critics and audiences sans compromises, releasing another album amazing enough to justify her double-Oscar-winner status, and edging out Ariana in the “forlorn breakup hit” sweepstakes. And while Sabrina Carpenter is no one’s idea of marginalized, her MIA give-a-fucks propelled her to a hard-sought peak just like Chappell’s did. There wasn’t a more potent feminist pop moment in ‘24 than “I beg you, don’t embarrass me, motherfucker”. Imagine Aretha, or Lesley Gore, singing that.
Where things go from here is an open question. Charli has taken seemingly endless victory laps over brat, and countless listeners will hungrily devour whatever Roan’s next act is. But of course, November’s electoral outcome eroded faith that our cultural tides were turning in an open-minded direction. (Roan herself has dealt with runaway fame in a refreshingly normal way, and threw herself in hot water as the only pop star willing to openly acknowledge the Biden administration’s horrible response to the Gaza crisis.) Back in the last Trump era, the punk-rock “resistance” which so many music lovers clamored for failed to materialize in any needle-moving way. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this wave of queer-queen pop keeps growing, and proves the better bulwark? Armed with all the girlypops’ newly-stoked passion, maybe we’ll stand a chance of surviving a few nuclear seasons.
- When Johnny Comes Marching Home: Rock ‘n’ Roll at 50 - February 20, 2025
- Year of the Girlypops or Charli/Chappell ’24 - December 12, 2024
- My Vanished Friend: Remembering Martin Phillipps of The Chills - July 28, 2024
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