How Much Charli XCX Is Too Much Charli XCX?

Yes, the current Brat arena tour is a well-earned victory lap. But because we’re talking about Charli XCX, one of the most self-aware pop stars of the last 15 years, it’s also more than a victory lap. It’s an interrogation of what a victory lap can mean in the culture at large. It’s a show that both contemplates and shakes its ass at the idea of oversaturation, of something being played out. The tour—which hit Brooklyn’s Barclays Center last night, the first of four sold-out dates there—is mostly a fun dance party and an excuse to wave your hands around alongside some black-and-lime-clad friends, but it’s also sort of sad. “It’s really hard to let go of Brat and let go of this thing that is so inherently me and become my entire life,” Charli confessed in a recent TikTok video. “I kind of want it to go on and on and on.”

Of course, it can’t keep going. She knows that; we know that. And therein lies the show’s tension. It tries to force Charli and her audience to live in the beautifully messy universe she created for just an hour and a half longer. To disregard the fact that Brat summer is already a couple of seasons in the rearview. To forget the context that became entwined with this phenomenon: that brief moment of excitement  surrounding “kamala IS brat,” the dashed hopes of a woman in the White House, the normalization of the manosphere, and the wretched notifications that now poison our phones every hour.