The backlash was swift. “Fans” spoke of entitlement, a bad attitude, and a lack of generosity, as if, because they vaulted her into the stratosphere, Roan owed them either perpetual grace or a performance of the same type of impenetrable bravado captured in the lyrics above. It got so bad that she began to fear for her own safety, as well as her family’s. “Part of me hopes I never have a hit again because then no one will ever expect anything from me again,” she told Rolling Stone in the aftermath.
But along with the backlash came an outpouring of support, especially from industry peers like Lorde, Phoebe Bridgers, and Charli xcx. In the latter’s case, it may be because Brat, underneath all those party-girl trappings, is a deeply similar project. Its beats signal a club classic, but the album’s lyrics tell a different story—one of a vulnerable, honest, and at times wholly insecure “young girl from Essex” (to borrow Lorde’s characterization), just trying to balance the forces of her irreconcilable inner and outer lives. Across songs like “I Might Say Something Stupid,” “Rewind,” and “I Think About It All The Time,” Charli paints herself as an incredibly canny curator of her own image, both 100 percent in charge and inextricably trapped by the paradoxes of her position. “I’m famous but not quite / But I’m perfect for the background / One foot in a normal life,” she sings on “I Might Say Something Stupid,” a perfect distillation of an experience that may not be the best of both worlds, despite what Hannah Montana promised so many years ago. On “I Think About It All The Time,” a radically honest song about weighing the pros and cons of motherhood, she further admits that her “career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all.”
That line was written before lime green became the de facto color of 2024. It was written before “brat” was chosen as Collins Dictionary’s word of the year or the term found its way into Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign. It was also written before the release of Brat And It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat, the four-months-later remix album that transformed Brat from a very good project into an extraordinary one. It’s not often that we get to watch an artist process what it means to become a supernova in real time, and Brat 2.0 absolutely delivered. While she could have treated the release as a simple victory party with all her famous friends, Charli instead recognized the potential of the vehicle she had created for herself and told the rest of the world why she had to put up that brattish sheen in the first place. Being famous, just like being a girl, is so confusing. “It’s a knife whеn you’re finally on top / ‘Cause logically the nеxt step is they wanna see you fall,” she sings on the “Sympathy Is A Knife” remix with Ariana Grande. On the new version of “So I,” she reflects that dancing on stage with late artist Sophie in 2016 is “as cool as I’m ever gonna feel”—long before the charts, stadiums, and fanaticism. But it’s on the remixed version of “I Think About It All The Time” (featuring Bon Iver) that she bleeds the most by far. “First off, you’re bound to the album / Then you’re locked into the promo / Next thing, three years have gone by… But there’s so much guilt involved when we stop working/’Cause you’re not supposed to stop when things start working,” she sings of trying to plan a future and perhaps even a family with her fiancé, George Daniel. One gets the sense that if Charli was actually running out of time, as she says she fears in the song’s chorus, she knows exactly which way she would run.
It’s fitting that Bon Iver was featured on that particular remix, because he also released an album this year—his first since 2019—meant to “unpack years of built-up darkness” he had acquired while “playing the part” of Bon Iver, as he wrote in the EP’s liner notes. Across the three songs that make up SABLE, (yes the comma is part of the title), Justin Vernon, the brain behind the Bon Iver moniker, went back to the building blocks that made him famous in 2007. Accompanied almost solely by his acoustic guitar, he apologizes, strips bare, and, in the space left by the absence of the constant pressure he calls a “metaphorical bruise,” is finally able to create anew. It was the isolation and forced pause caused by the pandemic that saved not only his career but his physical health, he explained. The anxiety of constantly having to perform—both onstage and in his personal life—had started to give him “literal physical symptoms.” It was only through resetting completely that he could begin to heal.
But while Bon Iver’s delayed pandemic album is an extreme example, Vernon wasn’t the only musician to delve into the ways fame, fortune, and public adoration are anathema to the creative process this year. Kendrick Lamar had perhaps the biggest run of his career in 2024 between the firestorm of “Not Like Us” and his surprise album, GNX. Still, he used part six of his “The Heart” song series to reminisce about the times he and Jay Rock used to smoke weed, laugh together, and make music on Pro Tools, long before he tried to “place [his] skillset as a Black exec.” His message for the youth? “Don’t let the socials gas you up or let emotions be your crutch / Pick up the phone and bust it up before the history is lost.” Life as a Black exec doesn’t leave much time for earnest, easy friendship or unbridled creative exploration. At least Lamar could metaphorically press rewind by carving out a space for his memories and curling up within his own lyrics.
But while isolation helped (or perhaps would have helped) some artists connect with what really matters, others expressed a very reasonable desire to live their lives outside the walls of their homes without feeling swarmed or accosted. “Things feel out of order/Look and look around, I’m not sure of/Pair of paranoia… Living between cameras and recorders/I want peace but can’t afford ya,” Tyler, the Creator sang on “Noid,” a Chromakopia track he paired with a video featuring Ayo Edebiri as a crazed fan. (She gets it, of course.) It’s the same thing Roan touched on in her Instagram post when she wrote about the “predatory behavior (disguised as ‘superfan’ behavior) that has become normalized because of the way women who are well-known have been treated in the past.” She just wants to giggle with her friends and go to a movie theater without feeling like she’s living through the “White Bear” episode of Black Mirror, like “every single person deserves to do.” The prize for achieving pop superstardom shouldn’t be a worldwide panopticon.
The horrors of one’s personhood becoming an entity for public consumption are nothing new. On one hand, it does seem like parasociality has ramped up with the advent of social media and presumed around-the-clock access to the stars. Here at The A.V. Club, we talked a lot in 2023 about the bizarre epidemic of terrible concert etiquette, and it follows that that bad behavior would eventually shift its focus to the singers themselves. Still, artists have always had to deal with some aspect of this culture of constant surveillance, no matter when they came up. What’s changed is that they finally seem to be empowering each other to speak out about it, no matter what their so-called “fans” may say.
But without a major cultural heel-turn that may never come, anyone who, in Roan’s words, “want(s) to be an artist for a very very long time” must necessarily deal with some aspect of this terrifying adulation if they want their work to be recognized. So they develop a thick skin and call themselves your “new addiction,” all while tending to their own metaphorical bruises as soon as the lights go down. “Lights, camera, bitch, smile / Even when you wanna die,” as Taylor Swift wrote on The Tortured Poets Department‘s “I Can Do It With A Broken Heart,” a song about dealing with a secret pain while touring that she then performed on said tour night after night. “All the piеces of me shatterеd as the crowd was chanting, ‘More’ / I was grinnin’ like I’m winnin’ / I was hittin’ my marks / ‘Cause I can do it with a broken heart,” she continued in the song’s chorus. If people are really listening, maybe next year she and the rest of her peers won’t have to.
