The ‘Espresso’ Theory of Gender Relations
The men dominating the Billboard Hot 100 this summer are doing traditional male things: picking fights, playing guitar, bellowing about being saved or sabotaged by the opposite sex. Meanwhile, what are the women of popular music up to? Being brats.
Brat may sound like an insult; Hollywood’s “Brat Pack” certainly didn’t appreciate the term in 1985. But when the hipster diva Charli XCX titled her new album Brat, which spawned a wave of memes with its bile-green cover, she crystallized a cultural mood: Seeming a little immature, a little selfish, a little nasty, has taken on an air of glamour. Although riffing on the archetype of the bad girl is pop tradition, the new insouciance has a distinctly mischievous bent. It’s the sound of young women cracking jokes with one another against a backdrop of growing alienation between the genders.
Take, for example, the pillow-voiced, poisonously witty Sabrina Carpenter. The 25-year-old former Disney Channel actor has been in the public eye for years—she’s now album!—but her stardom only reached escape velocity in recent months, after she opened for Taylor Swift on . Her fate was sealed by a hit, “,” whose success feels meta: Carpenter sings about being so hot that men can’t stop thinking about her, in a melody so catchy that listeners can’t stop thinking about it.
