"brat summer" Will Soon Be Widely Considered a Cringey and Corny Relic Because That's How Culture Works
that a moment is very meaningful for you does not force the world to stop
This post is not about poptimism! I’m not interested in music as music, here. I have zero desire to add any more to the pile of discussion of this current era of pop singers that have become so inescapable. (The pile to which I have added too much myself.) I am interested in our collective inability to look at the way that cultural obsessions become cultural detritus in very short order, with the people who were most obsessed often the first to move on. And I’m fascinated by the way so many pop music fanatics have seen, say, the Meghan Trainor experience up close and yet cannot fathom the strong possibility that Sabrina Carpenter (or whoever) is on the Trainor trajectory. “brat summer” was all that anybody talked about, the summer ended, and we’re now in the strange interregnum between obsession and irrelevance. But that moment will indeed be irrelevant and, frequently, the target of derision by the very people that once celebrated it. Because that’s how culture works.
To prove I’m not just out here grinding my anti-pop-hegemony axe, let’s talk about sports first. Sports commentary is incredible because it involves a ton of gasbags constantly declaring that one or another player is THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME or that some random game was THE GREATEST GAME OF ALL TIME and how we’ll remember this season as an inflection point in the most important sports narratives ever…. And then, ten or five years or even three years in the future, it’s all forgotten.
I’ve already pointed out that the GOAT discourse in the NFL is wild. Tom Brady was considered a lock to be considered the best to ever play, after his fifth and sixth and seventh Super Bowl victories, and last played a professional football game less than two years ago, and yet many many people will tell you that he’s been surpassed. Which, to again repeat myself, makes you wonder what “of all time” can really mean. The Kansas City Chiefs are looking to become the first back to back to back Super Bowl winners, but they will not be the first NFL threepeat - the Green Bay Packers and quarterback Bart Starr won three in a row in the late 1960s. Everyone’s talking about how the Chiefs will live forever in Valhalla if they threepeat. But how often does anyone think about the 1965-1967 Green Bay Packers? How many fans even know the name Bart Starr? Hell, when was the last time you thought about Brett Favre? Sports are built on this fundamental tension - the people who cover and present them feel the need to constantly create stakes by rendering every game in historical terms. Tonight’s game will forever change the legacy of this league! And then, the next week, there are more games, and they too are called world-historic, and the world trundles on. There are always more games, more players, more dynasties, more records and achievements to come.
We are creatures that live in the flow of time but seem unable to understand our place within it even though no other fact suggests itself to us so insistently.