Charli XCX Brought Her ‘Brat’ Remix Album to an Outdoor Art Museum. It Fit Right In
More than 100 sculptures are scattered across the 500-acre grounds of Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley: There’s Magdalena Abakanowicz’s Sarcophagi in Glass Houses, a piece from 1989 that draws parallels between turbine engines and the human body; Alice Aycock’s Three-Fold Manifestation II stands at 29 feet, depicting a seemingly endless spiral. The outdoor museum gained an additional multi-dimensional work on Thursday: a 30-foot installation of Charli XCX’s Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat album artwork and track list with a DJ booth positioned in the corner.
Standing on top of the booth, Charli looked out across a crowd of fans who made the midweek trek to the museum with barely 48-hours notice. “Thank you for coming; I was worried no one would,” she said. There was a hint of amusement in her voice, slight disbelief that people would come this far just to hear the remixed edition of her summer blockbuster album, Brat, with special guests and new verses on each track. (Even more fans joined in on a live Twitch stream that let them enjoy the show wherever they were.)
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For Charli, this album cycle has been full of serendipitous success and unexpected cultural moments: Its aesthetic was co-opted for a political campaign. It reached Saturday Night Live spoof-level. It took Charli from the pseudo-underground she’s dominated in pop for nearly a decade and placed her at a sold-out Madison Square Garden show. Why draw the line at a 4 p.m. DJ set at Storm King? Let Brat autumn officially commence.
“How motherfucking sick is this?” Charli said to the crowd. “We’re fine-art bitches now.” An enthusiastic fan interjected just then and the singer repeated their remark back through her microphone: “‘Art Bitch,’ yes, a deep cut.” The reference was to “Art Bitch,” a demo that Charli uploaded to MySpace in November 2008 at 16. “Deep cut” doesn’t feel like the appropriate descriptor; ancient artifact would be more apt. There’s some incredible foreshadowing in the “Art Bitch” lyrics: “Out in the fields drinking JD and Coke from plastic bottles,” she sings on one verse. The crowd at Storm king wasn’t sipping on Jack and Coke, but they were out in the fields drinking Brat-themed Midori cocktails and bright orange Aperol spritzes.
Charli loves a reference. That’s the whole basis of Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat. She opened her set with the remixed version of “Von Dutch,” which features A.G. Cook and Addison Rae. It’s the oldest track on the album, having been released in March. She followed it up with a taste of something new with “Everything Is Romantic” featuring Caroline Polachek — or at least she hoped it was new. A few hours before the listening party, songs from the remix album surfaced online. “I know it leaked,” Charli said. “But I know that no one here listened to the leaks. If you’re fucking singing the words, I’ll know, bitch.” Her exchanges with the audience were comfortably casual. She bantered with them and played songs from the record directly from a phone hooked up to the audio system.
Charli didn’t overexplain the album. Her set included the new version of “So I” with A.G. Cook and “Club Classics” with BB Trickz. When she played the Shygirl-assisted “365,” she quipped: “Oh, the poppers are out in the front.” You can take the Brats out of the club, but you can’t take the club out of the Brats.
Some fans pulled up in tattered, netted clothes and their best Brat green fits — all of which have likely seen darker and sweatier venues than the Storm King grounds. Others went for a more casual-chic look, like Charli in her oversized low-rise jeans and fur-trimmed jacket, or their Sweat Tour merch. When she dropped “B2B” with Tinashe, all of those lines blurred even more as the wave of bodies bounced together.
“One of the reasons that I wanted to do this project was because I feel like it’s really cool to show the infinite possibilities of dance music and music in general,” Charli said. “To me, when a song comes out, when you make the song, there’s still so many different versions of that song that could be made using just a tiny element of the production from the original, or a tiny reference to a lyrical concept, or a literal lyric. I just feel it can all be deconstructed and then put back together again. Why not? Why just be like, ‘It’s the album, and it’s done?’” Before she stepped out of a black Escalade at around 4:30 p.m., she had the original Brat album running from top to bottom to set the stage for what was to come.
Charli followed her brief speech with the first official reveal of “Sympathy Is a Knife” featuring Ariana Grande, and also played “Mean Girls” with Julian Casablancas. After those, she only had time to spin two more records before she had to leave. Her New York outing fell on the one day in between her appearances in Dallas and Denver this week. The audience around the DJ booth shouted for “I Might Say Something Stupid” featuring the 1975 and Jon Hopkins, “I Think About It All the Time” with Bon Iver, and “Apple” featuring the Japanese House, but Charli opted to play “Rewind” with Bladee for the last new song. She closed the set with the Lorde-assisted “Girl, So Confusing” remix, sprinkling in some humble praise: “Didn’t she just eat this verse up? She ate me up.”
Even after Charli hopped back into the car, her fans kept the party going. Clusters of people lingered to take photos in front of the Brat installation, while others stuck around just to dance to the remixes still playing over the speakers. On the way out, some tapped into their inner child and rolled down the hill just below Mark di Suvero’s Frog Legs, a sculpture that spins at 360 degrees. Depending on which angle it’s observed from, the clouds and landscapes surrounding it take on new views. Storm King but it’s completely different — but also still Brat.
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