I spent most of yesterday violently howling at Dua Lipa getting aggressively ukelele-d whilst minding her own damn business at Glastonbury. Louis Tomlinson smuggling a TV in to watch football at the musical metropolis was another highlight, and who among us could forget Marina Abramović, the human peace sign?
Something about scrolling comfortably from home, not a touch hungover, felt both smug and sort of lonely. I had missed the camping and queuing and portaloos, but had I also missed the camaraderie? I could stream any performance, but I’d lost the scale and serendipity with the Worthy Farm–ers. I couldn’t help but wonder: Was I better off in my own bed, or should I have been moshing with Paul Mescal and his house keys?
For most of the weekend, though, I was hooting and hollering, convinced that summer was shaping up nicely—ripening like James’s giant peach while I’d been a nasty girl and sipped that me espresso. Then I remembered Joe Biden’s alarming demeanor at the first presidential debate and hush-money Trump possibly getting reelected and his partial immunity from criminal prosecution. And then Hurricane Beryl and Gaza and the enormous tragedy during a recent satsang. The dingy, important, inescapable sludge of real life flooded back in.
Summer is putting me through a loop with its emotional zigzagging, and I know I’m not the only one. We’re all suffering through the yin and yang of it, the Kendrick and Drake of it, the Elphaba and Glinda. One minute we’re asking where you’re summering and, the next, if Kamala should be on the ticket in seven weeks. The UK is just as stressful: The leadership farce since David Cameron has left great swathes of the general public politically demotivated, apathetic to those in power and their disenfranchising, at times even cruel, policies.
The world is at once light and heavy, unbearable to carry and so pumped full of helium it drifts away out of reach. The vibe keeps shifting, ricocheting between a chic Parisian Olympics and a drizzly Wimbledon that looks nothing like Challengers. We’re often leaving the company of greatness (did I mention the ukulele?) for an incredibly bad hang (did I mention the Tories?). It’s not a bad summer or a good summer, it’s just a constant readjustment to the latest drop. Weird vibes are everywhere, they’re so Julia.
You already know it’s a Brat summer. The pop girlies have dropped beats all year, but nothing’s cut through like Charli XCX’s Brat, a nuclear green oil spill on our summer beaches. The 365 party girl’s album surpasses the tired narrative of falling in love and breaking up that traps most pop songs, instead speaking to the richer, amorphous layer below the mantle.
In its way, it’s both a respite from and a soundtrack to current affairs. Charli talks about how it feels to be a woman (and, arguably, a gay man) managing the inherent viciousness of modern life when you are both confident and self-conscious, capable and compliant. The lurid green album revels in gray issues: knowing (and/or being) a mean girl, motherhood versus party monster–ing, not quite frenemy-ing Lorde. It’s so confusing, sometimes, to be alive—but Brat is here and Brat sees us, a companion while the world spins weirdly on.