In those primitive days right after the release of Charli XCX’s “Brat,” before a chartreuse cloud blotted out the sky (somewhere in America, a pastor is writing a sermon about how Jesus was brat), every track ranking I saw slotted the song “Apple” too low.
Then, a viral dance catapulted the tune into the zeitgeist. It became the highest-charting “Brat” song in the U.K., before a remix of bonus track “Guess” featuring Billie Eilish rode a wave of panties to No. 1. The song also broke into the Billboard Hot 100, the only track beside lead single “360” to make it that far in the U.S. The dance itself made it to the Paris Olympics and Amish country.
I wondered: Why did people underrate “Apple” until a few synchronized hand motions forced them to listen? Maybe because it’s easier to be so Julia than to swallow family trauma in a pop song.
Charli XCX contains hedonistic multitudes, but I think you can split her catalogue down symmetrical lines. You have noisy, experimental tracks I lovingly think of as fax machine music (“Vroom Vroom” at the far end, then drifting to the middle with things like “How I’m Feeling Now”). The other side is the hook-first, chrome-plated pop (“Sucker” at the extreme and gradually dialing the outré back in through “Crash” and the like). Bonafide cultural coup “Brat” works so well because it harmonizes that duality. The agony and the XCX-tasy, if you will.
Pop girlie Charli has always gotten me revved up more than mad scientist Charli. “Apple” has been my favorite track from jump. On that AOL modem-to-gay catnip spectrum, it’s decidedly on the latter end. The song has all of Charli’s tastiest instincts, from an easy-to-whistle melody to hypnotic lyrical repetition. (“The airport/ the airport …”)
I think “Apple” was destined to break through, even if wasn’t with TikTok dances and chart numbers. It’s part of a proud lineage of singalong confections with utterly crushing subject matter. Crying-in-the-club music. A spoonful of sonic sugar. It always makes the devastation of life go down. Robyn is the alpha and the omega of this sub-genre: “Dancing On My Own,” “With Every Heartbeat,” “Be Mine!” and “Missing U,” to name some of her most depressing earworms.
Those songs make romantic tragedy sound like vodka soda and strobe lights. That’s why I find “Apple” particularly fascinating as a specimen. Instead of heartbreak from hell, it interrogates family trauma with a switch of its hips. It’s right there in super-singable metaphor:
I think the apple's rotten right to the core
From all the things passed down
From all the apples coming before
I split the apple down symmetrical lines
And what I find is kinda scary
Charli confirmed that “Apple” is about reckoning with her relationship to her parents. The usual issues that an adult might have with the people who raised them, the song suggests, are as natural and inevitable as rot in poorly tended fruit. That’s not even touching on Charli’s experiences as a British woman of Indian heritage; check out Sameena Khan’s essay about that for The New Feminist.
As an elevator pitch, intergenerational trauma doesn’t scream “song of the summer.” But “Apple” isn’t even a pioneer. We return to this well over and over. Country music is full of songs about it. Kendrick Lamar has rapped about it. Sufjan Stevens wrote a whole album about it. Harry Chapin’s “Cat in the Cradle” isn’t very brat, yet it is the soundtrack to thousands of car karaoke sessions about cyclical parental alienation.
Neko Case’s “Nearly Midnight, Honolulu” is a fave of mine in the indie-rock sphere. Case witnesses the origins of trauma through a hauntingly spare address to a verbally abused child. Instead of unpacking it after the fact, she’s both a crime-scene witness and a clairvoyant.
Since we’re all going to therapy now, artists are giving us more and more bangers/sobbers about the ickier inheritances from their parents: “Family Line” by Conan Gray, “Dynasty” by Rina Sawayama, “Thumbs” by Lucy Dacus, just to name a few. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all of those artists explore queerness in their work, too.
You don’t need a lyrical mandate for what you find to be kinda scary and make you just want to drive (… to the airport, the airport). The Law of Right Place, Right Time sometimes links a song to a feeling. The Shins’ “Simple Song,” for example, pummels me right in the double helix. James Mercer wrote it about the redemptive power of his relationship with his wife, which I didn’t even realize until writing this. Like most good songs, its words are just abstract enough to form whatever mirror you need.
I know that things can really get rough when you go it alone
Don't go thinking you gotta be tough, and play like a stone
Could be there’s nothing else in our lives, so critical
As this little home
My relationship with my family broke down in slow motion during the past decade-plus — over sexuality (mine), zealotry (theirs), and the rot between. I’d sit in my car before and after seeing them, girding for and recovering from fraught moments. On a visit to see my father in the hospital a few years ago, I sat in the parking garage and looped “Simple Song.” Mortality knocked. Fractures widened. I grasped for a tether to people I loved but who stared at me like disgusted ghosts every time I saw them.
Mercer sang of fears and life in an upturned boat. The chorus gripped my shoulders and shook me — thing really could get rough when you go it alone. I didn’t want to be tough. And for better or worse, my little home felt more critical than ever.
There’s a good explanation for how my brain got from “restorative power of the wife” to “familial decay.” The song’s music video, directed by “Everything Everywhere All at Once” duo Daniels, features a family reliving painful memories of their dead father. In the end, their home comes down around them. My deepening estrangement from my parents, driven by generations of bad religion and stubbornness, felt a little like that.
That brings me back to “Brat.” Charli actually covers quite the thematic spread on the album, from jealousy and aging (“Sympathy is a Knife,” “Rewind”) to cocaine and Lorde (“365,” “Girl, So Confusing”). The stellar “So I” excruciatingly examines the messiness of mourning a friend. In fact, there are only a couple songs on “Brat” squarely about love or sex.
The only thing more universal than attraction is family. Everyone’s got one. We need an “Apple” every now and then to help us work through the things we get that we didn’t even want.
Something rad this week
The poster for Irish music biopic “Kneecap” is distressing. It looks like a sinus headache feels. Such a shame, because Rich Peppiatt’s film is one of the year’s best. Funny, free, and freaky. You give me a movie about young men bonding through music to fight fascism, and I’ll stan every time.
Before the end credits, I didn’t know that A) Kneecap is a real music group, or B) the members play themselves in the movie. It was like drinking a great new cocktail and finding out later that it was served to you in the Holy Grail. Don’t miss it in theaters!
So glad to get to read your words in my inbox each week!