Cringe at the cusp
A few days ago, I tweeted this as a joke. Ben, who writes at arg min, among other things, told me to finish the thought. Maybe he was joking too, but here we are.
I’ll be honest: despite my best efforts, I have never really liked Charli xcx’s music. Her sound was pretty mainstream pop-y until she started working with producer A.G. Cook around 2016. Her style started shifting toward that of his PC Music label: references to musical trends from the 1990s and 2000s; dense synths and exaggerated vocal effects; the sonic equivalent of shiny, maximalist, indulgent consumerism. Since that shift, she has not really been “mainstream” anymore. But no matter what era of Charli you look at, her music has been, to my taste, devoid of substance. Paradoxically, her music has everything while saying nothing at all.
Brat is… the same, but more? The autotune, synth claps, and four-to-the-floor are even more overbearing than the past couple of albums. And all the tracks are kind of the same? Everything is so bright green that it all becomes beige!
My biggest problem, personal hatred of autotune aside, is that it feels that we’ve seen this all before. It’s tired. Even the album art, which is supposed to be flippant and of course, bratty, is just using the intentionally awkward, unpolished Gen Z aesthetic that’s been around for a few years now in memes and social media.
The difference between Brat and her past few albums is simply that it blew up. And the fact that it has been embraced by the mainstream, while her previous, similar albums were not, says something about where we are culturally. So I am probably in the minority when I say this, but I think it’s cringe. Why? The core of it is this: it’s an album that presents itself as counterculture, effortless, a bit edgy. But it’s not-so-secretly just about projecting a highly-crafted image1, under which there is no musical substance. Not that being highly crafted is rare for marketing, but this low-effort aesthetic is honestly remarkable.
In other words, my take is that Brat is cringe because I perceive it to be inauthentic and not self-aware. Note my wording there, because cringe is extremely subjective! I will come back to this later.
I’ve been trying to nail down my own definition of cringe, and it’s actually really hard! In thinking about situations when I feel this way, a few themes emerge: unawareness, inauthenticity, obvious desire to appeal, misunderstanding of trends, unlikeability. I think these axes capture at least some of it?
But no matter how you define it, you feel it when you see it. And boy, did we all feel it when this happened:
Which happened after Charli tweeted this:
I am honestly curious as to what her intentions were in tweeting this, but whatever. I cringed.
Millennial/Gen Z cusp babies (AKA Zillennials), including myself, are highly cynical of The Establishment, for obvious reasons. Nowadays, a guaranteed way to induce cringe is for a corporation, or a government entity such as the Democratic Party, to appropriate a trendy topic for their PR. It feels tryhard and out of touch, like this:
The main point in my tweet though, is something new. Brat is the first time I have cringed at something that has Gen Z energy2. And the Harris campaign’s adoption definitely made it worse. Charli and I are both Zillennials, so I know that I’m dissing myself too when I say this, but maybe… older parts of Gen Z culture, and by association, Zillennials, are starting to not be cool anymore?
As someone who is far too online, I’ve been able to understand and reference current cultural trends pretty well, even though I’m no longer in the age group that drives those trends. But recently, I’ve been seeing incomprehensible memes for the first time. I’ve started to really not understand new slang (“aura”?). I have to ask myself: am I too old to wear big pants?
It’s often hard to tell sincerity from satire these days, especially when entangled with capitalism. I think the only way we resolve the ambiguity is to impose our own experience and biases. My perception of someone’s authenticity and self-awareness is always inferred, and not explicit; cringe is subjective. So, something being cringe may actually say more about the cringer than the cringee.
What does it say about me that I find Brat to be cringe? Maybe I am just an arrogant music snob. Maybe I haven’t done enough drugs. Or maybe in my obsession to pin down cringe, I myself have become… cringe. Especially as a Zillennial who’s still on Twitter, writing this silly post on Substack.
But as with most external judgment, cringe only affects you if you care. Maybe this is what separates the cringees from the cringers: self-assuredness in your tastes and identity, regardless of how they relate to the zeitgeist. Disregard for the concept of cringe in the first place. If Charli’s music is fun and makes you want to dance and be happy, does anything else matter?
After all this, perhaps we need transcendence, if you will, from cringe. There is no cringe or cool, there is only… working it out on the remix? I’m certainly not there yet, as you can see from this post. And if you think this ending is cringe, you’re not there either!
Special thanks to my friend Mika for helping me edit and clarify my thoughts by arguing with me about Brat. And to my less-old, big-pants-wearing sister for analysis of Charli and PC Music.
There is much more important stuff to be said here about capitalism and music but this is not a serious blog, and I think I would actually pass away if I tried to go into it.
Even if I disagree, love reading you in long-form, Galen!