Beyond Brat Summer: Internet Cool Girls and Nihilism

Ida R

When Charli XCX’s sixth album, Brat was first released in June of 2024, it quickly gained the momentum to become both a hit album and cultural phenomenon. The music is fun, danceable, and introspective. Within this combination of exhilarating hyperpop and often vulnerable lyrics, Brat resonated so much with people that its impact extended past the music into a lifestyle trend as well: brat summer.  Even for those not chronically online, brat summer was popularized as an era for embracing your most hedonistic and chaotic self. It’s messy, party girl. It’s lazy, smudged makeup. It’s knee-high boots and cigarettes. Above all else, brat summer is about being unapologetically yourself. And I love it. Believe the hype on this one, Brat is just as innovative and exciting as everyone says it is. 

This is all to say, however, that there is one choice on Brat that stands out to me as disappointingly ignorant. In an interview with The Face, Charli clarifies that “Mean Girls,” the thirteenth track of the album, was inspired by internet personality Dasha Nekrasova and other “succubus-looking, dead-eyed women.” On a surface level, this is very understandable. Brat summer was all about embracing brashness and allowing yourself to be imperfect, messy, and yes, even mean sometimes. Charli’s unabashed praise of this feels liberating: “This one’s for all my mean girls/This one’s for all my bad girls,” complete acceptance of multifaceted and flawed women. Dasha fits this persona to a T. Her Instagram is full of photos of her stylishly slouching against walls or over furniture, staring at the camera with “drawl and dead eyes” as if she couldn’t care less about her picture being taken. And there’s a lot going for a trend where the primary focus is letting women be unapologetically messy. But as soon as you start to learn more about Dasha Nekrasova as a person, things get a bit complicated. 

Dasha initially gained notoriety in 2018 when a clip of her dryly mocking an Infowars interviewer went viral. She seemed utterly unbothered, casually sipping her iced coffee and retorting, “You people have, like, worms in your brains.” Dubbed “Sailor Socialism” for her sailor-style outfit and outspoken support for Bernie Sanders, she quickly became something of an internet sensation. The video clip softly boosted her and co-host Anna Khachiyan’s cultural commentary podcast, Red Scare, into the limelight. Their gimmick tended towards something like “hot, mean girl Marxists” disregarding political correctness. While the podcast began as a dirtbag leftist perspective, it slowly but surely slid into alt-right contrarianism. 

Despite her claims that she’s just “shitposting,” Dasha’s alleged irony seems to be more of a flimsy cover for her genuine beliefs. Her ruthless jabs have been touted as “refreshingly honest” or “bold” by some but, personally, I struggle to see a single thing she actually stands for. A few months ago, images circulated of her and her boyfriend shooting a target dressed in Palestinian garb. Other notable moments include hosting Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson on the podcast, casual usage of slurs, deriding the #MeToo movement, insulting models with disabilities, and promoting eating disorders a la 2014 proana Tumblr. Lyrics from “Mean Girls” like “You said she’s anorexic and you heard she likes it when people say it” flirt with these controversies as aspects that make people like Dasha compelling. She plays up nonchalance over being “problematic” to feed into her disaffected It-Girl image. Isn’t she interesting because she’s thin and trendy and couldn’t care less what people think? Isn’t she interesting because she’s a young woman in 2024 still using “gay” as an insult? Her politics can be summed up as this: everything is a joke and therefore, it is embarrassing to care about anything. She doesn’t want to make art that has an “agenda” but she voiced acted in Disco Elysium, a heavily political video game (though she claims that she has never played or researched it). She’s Catholic because it’s (and I quote) an “aesthetic” religion. She would rather provide a platform to reactionary figures to amuse herself than challenge anything they say. Her bigotry is ironic until it’s not. 

With a recent tweet stating that “kamala IS brat,” it’s interesting to see Charli using a person like Dasha as a source of inspiration. Charli has generally presented liberal beliefs when she has spoken out so this may seem a bit contradictory. But, it is important to acknowledge that we don’t really actually know anything about Charli as a person. Her views are not necessarily reflective of Dasha’s and we should not look to celebrities to be moral paragons. There is nothing wrong with continuing to enjoy and listen to Charli’s music — her connection to Dasha and the Red Scare podcast matters little in the grand scheme of things. She is not a significant political actor and her takes largely reach only a pretty niche online community. However, she clearly matters enough to me to write this article. What concerns me beyond her general ideology is the steadily increasing trendiness of what she represents: utter passivity and apathy towards legitimate issues. To me, it is incredibly callous to laugh in the face of people who are having their rights stripped away from them, of people who are trying to advocate for others. Even if unintentionally, Charli’s “Mean Girls” props up Dasha’s regressive attitude as almost aspirational. It feels like a major step back when the icons of younger voters are people who want to treat politics as an aesthetic, as an accessory to their chic personas. 

Charli describes the titular girl in her song as “real intelligent” and “in Vogue.” The popularity of the Red Scare podcast and Dasha’s growing acting career absolutely vouches for this. Both Dasha and her co-host, Anna, walked in Rachel Comey’s Spring 2019 fashion show: a testament to their It-Girl status outside of political commentary. When interviewed by The Cut about the experience, Dasha had this to say: “Wow, my life’s okay, but I would literally trade it all — the podcast, Adam, my status as a socialist icon… — I would trade it all to be an extremely hot and relevant model for five seconds.”  I believe that here, it is evident where her priorities as a cultural influencer lie. With the upcoming presidential election, I think it’s time for us to look more critically at the aesthetics and lifestyle trends that seep into popular consciousness. How closely are we allowing them to govern our lives and views?