Is a young dad allowed to have a Brat summer . . . in winter?
Brat summer has taken the Northern Hemisphere by storm. Trapped in the Australian winter and expecting a second child, Esquire columnist Jonathan Seidler contemplates his desire to 'be Brat'
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Jonathan Seidler is an Australian writer. This is his column for Esquire.
LAST WEEKEND was my birthday, bringing me one step closer to forty and three steps further from ever being called a ‘young person’ again – unless you ask my grandmother. It triggered an existential funk the likes of which is expected in young fathers soon to be dragged back into the trenches of zero sleep and baby bawling, but one that was accompanied by a banging soundtrack. The truth of the matter is that I am a 37-year-old soon to be father of two, stuck in an Australian winter, desperate for a Brat summer. I am not sure this is wise or even allowed – craving a moment of less care, more fun – but I simply cannot keep it in anymore.
A primer for those in my age bracket condemned to only using Spotify to play The Wiggles: Brat is the latest album by British pop star and producer Charli XCX, which has omnivorously swallowed the culture whole and refused to make room for anything else since dropping on June 4, which is basically an entire lifetime in internet years. A record dedicated to the filthy backroom hedonism of the mid-2000s, it’s become something of a lightning rod in politically divisive and economically shaky times. Brat summer, which nods to the Northern Hemisphere where Charli lives, is something of a social call to arms inspired by the record; it tells its adherents to celebrate friendship, have unscripted, messy fun and live like tomorrow might never arrive, which, given the amount of concurrent wars happening across the globe, doesn’t seem like an outlandish notion.
In the same way that anything can be dyed Charli’s signature slime green (the latest being Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris) or formatted into a deliciously low-res serif and endlessly repeated as an online gag, Brat summer has proven to be a remarkably robust, pluralistic concept, one that lives in both the real and online world. And while Brat summer is ostensibly for young women of a certain age in another hemisphere, the base desire it feeds into and so sensationally soundtracks is both seasonally and gender-agnostic. You can have a Brat summer if you are a 19 year-old girl in Paris or 55 year-old gay man in Paris, Texas.
I have been listening to and following Charli XCX’s career for over a decade, from the time she wrote and stole the limelight on Icona Pop’s ‘I Don’t Care’ and Iggy Azalea’s ‘Fancy’. But where these songs – and much of Charli’s early work – embraced pure individualism, the appeal of Brat summer, as evidenced in its iconic posse cut for ‘360’, is in hanging out and getting dumb with your friends. It’s right there in the lyrics to ‘Club classics’, which reference everyone from Julia Fox to producer/peers AG Cook, Hudson Mohawke and SOPHIE. In a time of social disconnection and rampant inflation, partying with mates is a luxury money can’t buy.
It’s famously hard for men to keep friends as they age, and it’s even harder to make new ones. Going out with groups of mates of either sex was never something I used to have to actively think about; we just found each other at the same pub or club or house party as if pulled together by invisible forces. These days it’s necessarily more difficult. Toddlers don’t care about hangovers. Negotiations with partners need to be made for nights out. Nobody has the energy. Invisible battle lines are drawn between single and couple friends, those with kids and those without. If I wanted to go, pick up an analog vape and dance all night to pop music, I’m not even sure who I would call.
It’s possible that I’m just wired differently to some of my mates. Maybe they’re not craving a Brat summer in winter like I am. Perhaps they see footage of huge bands of kids at Primavera, Glastonbury, or Charli’s pop-up clubs in London and New York and think ‘Oh god. Not for me, thanks.’ That’s fair enough. They are probably normal. The desire to ‘be Brat’ is a likely sign of some deeper, Munchian scream that affects young parents about to have another child or maybe just specific kinds of elder millennials in permanent denial regarding their age, still plugged into the same content streams as those who mercifully missed out on Ed Hardy the first time.
I went to sleep for an entire month hearing the vroom-vroom synths of ‘Von Dutch’, one of the album’s first singles, in my dreams, like The Joker trying to deny his true impulses. I impotently blasted it in my car in a sad rave for one and almost blew my CX-5’s speakers. This self-immolation happened to me once before, during the pandemic, ironically also with a Charli XCX song called ‘Claws’. Then, like now, it signified a mood, a craving of connection that seemed tantalisingly close but also tantalisingly out of reach, like seeing oneself reflected on the other side of bulletproof glass.
I know there are other aspiring Brat summer dads out there. The ones who want to feel unbridled abandon every so often without necessarily abandoning their responsibilities altogether. Because the flipside is a hollow, scrolling sort of loneliness. Surely, we can still inhabit our inner Brat even when you love your wife and child who is not yet old enough to become a brat. We don’t really talk about that enough, but like Charli, I think about it all the time.
Jonathan Seidler is an Australian writer, father and nu-metal apologist. He is the author of a memoir called It’s A Shame About Ray and a novel titled All the Beautiful Things You Love, which is out now. Jonno has some interesting things to say about music, fatherhood, Aussie culture, mental health, problematic faves and the social gymnastics of group chats. This is his column for Esquire. You can see all of his previous columns here.
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