I don’t listen to Charli XCX, and I think the majority of Substacks are worthless boomerslop. Both of these factors should make it fairly obvious that I am not an ally to the British singer and songwriter. However, I do respect artists who dare to explore different fields, and I have a tendency to make a big deal out of things most people wouldn’t normally care about, so perhaps it was inevitable her recent essay would show up on my radar.
Titled “The Death of Cool,” the essay started making the rounds on social media, and it caused a bit of a stir. Not to be confused with Gavin McInnes’s book of the same name, it was the sort of thing that had to be clicked. People loved it, people hated it, people loved to hate it. Same goes for pretty much everything celebrities do today. Before social media, celebrities would make films, or release albums, and it was assumed that the public adored them. Now, a celebrity tweets something and the first comment is inevitably something like “lol haha lol u suk bals lololololollololllol.”
Some celebs shrug, “lol internet,” and just move on. Most, however, seem to take it as a bigoted personal attack and completely lose their shit.
I don’t know which camp Charli falls into, but being an outsider, the polarised response made me want to read the essay. I went in with an open mind. There was no expectation. I didn’t know if she was going to write about the Brat album, or how the title became a meme and had a life of its own, but it ended up being about something else entirely: a deep dive into “cool” as a general concept.
I’m not sure it’s a word that needs a definition. I’ve always gone through life just feeling like I know what cool is based on vibes. People like Andre Benjamin and Jonathan Davis are cool to me. That’s as far as it goes.
To quote Charli:
“To be boring is to die right there on the spot. Give up, give in, go home, stay home, end it all. Boredom is something I dread to feel and dread to inflict on others and therefore I guess that means I equate ‘coolness’ to being fascinating and interesting 24/7. A 365 party girl was born.”
That actually sounds quite exhausting, but the way I read it, it seems like Charli figures coolness as something that is defined via negativa, attempting to describe it by what it is not. Cool is such because it’s the opposite of boredom. The essay continues, and while she rejects the idea that mainstream popularity kills cool, she also connects her need to feel interesting and engaging to her creative identity. To avoid being boring, she would rather appeal to a select few than be popular with everyone.
Charli then recounts a pivotal moment where she went to see a friend’s band performing in London. While the band members were technically proficient and talented, the performance felt flat and indistinguishable, with audience enthusiasm to match:
“A few years ago I went to see a friend of a friend’s band perform in London…. I said ‘There was no spark! No magic! No distinction!…’ ….The audience watching didn’t feel like they belonged to a community that was unbelievably important to them, there was no sense of rabid fandom, it was just people standing and watching and bopping along. They were present but equally not really there at all. It felt like they’d decided to pop to the show on a whim and check it out. The whole thing was one big shrug with a huge air of indifference. Everyone felt unaffected. Everything felt vague. It was not cool.”
The band looked and sounded just like any other, and this is when coolness is lacking:
When art tries to please everyone instead of being something specific, it loses its essence.
I am all too familiar with what she’s describing. In Australia, music is dominated by Triple J, and an overarching culture of lo-fi, indie homogeneity. In order to make it big here, artists have to kiss the ring and proffer music that meets the station’s rather narrow scope. Talented musicians, definitely, but what they put out is so mundane and formulaic that it could easily be taught in our Number and Algebra curriculum. And people absorb it, comfortable in the notion that it’s an alternative to the mainstream, while being blinded to its musical conformity and overarching mediocrity. I guess the mentality is if it’s Australian and it sells, then it must be cool.
Except it isn’t. Everyone sounds like everyone. You start looking a bit one-dimensional when every artist pushed to radio sounds like the last, artists trip over themselves to pander to a particular scene, and it’s all geared towards mass consumption. As a result, Triple J has seen a steady decline in listeners as the kids get bored. What was once branded with authenticity and the voice of youth is now the most normie-coded slop in existence (think about what “indie” means).
So, I actually found myself relating very strongly to Charli’s boredom. It’s when artistic expression becomes generalised, and a “something for everyone” approach becomes the norm, that artistic expression becomes eroded, and individual identity is subsumed beneath the whole.
Another moment for Charli was the release of her sixth studio album, Brat. The album was a phenomenal commercial success, peaking at number one on the charts in the UK, Australia, Croatia, Ireland, and New Zealand, and making the top ten in every other market that matters. Fuelled by the success of its singles, “Von Dutch,” “360,” and “Apple,” to say that it was one of the biggest releases of 2024 would be an understatement.
But history is a relay race of unintended consequences, and Brat very quickly took on a life of its own. Not the album per se, but the greater social phenomenon inspired by it. The album’s cover was described as “confrontational” by critics, and that aesthetic of black text over a specific shade of green was suddenly popping up everywhere. First as a wall in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, painted and repainted in anticipation of the album’s release. Then came the “Brat generator” online tool that let people replace the text quickly and conveniently.
And then “Brat Summer.” Much of the zeitgeist for 2024 had to do with the “brat girl,” a persona and philosophy centred on rebellious female archetypes of history. Cleopatra, Wu Zetian, Lucrezia Borgia, Georgiana Cavendish, and George Sand being just a few.
Or you could just quote Urban Dictionary:
“An unapologetic party or ‘messy’ girl aesthetic for the summer based on the vibes of Charli xcx’s new album ‘brat.’ Often including a hot yet trashy appearance and a lighter and sunglasses always on hand, the trend gained popularity on TikTok after the album’s release.”
When Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 United States presidential election, and Kamala Harris took the reins, she made her banner picture an imitation of the Brat album cover, with the words “Kamala HQ.” Videos on Instagram and TikTok popped up everywhere with footage of Harris with Charli XCX songs playing in the background. On and on it went.
Whatever Charli hoped to get across with the album, the substance of the music and imagery were completely out of her hands. Brands and ordinary listeners alike would co-opt it, alter it. Like a never-ending game of Salma Told Sabrina, these constantly shifting interpretations would eventually dilute the essence of what initially made Brat unique for Charli, what made it cool.
It’s not just the lamentations of a pop star, however. Charli ends the essay making room for the possibility that with confidence and a strong sense of taste (whatever that might be), anything can be made cool. Coolness is not inherent to anything in particular, but is situational and interpretive.
So, is coolness really dead? What interests people these days? Who is engaging? I lived through the 90s and 2000s, eras that zoomers romanticise as being a golden age of everything cool. It’s not because culture in my day was better — actually, a lot of it was pretty fucking lame — it’s that so much of what comes out today is mass-produced, astroturfed slop that one can’t help but look at bygone eras with rose-tinted glasses.
That, and everyone is terminally online. Nothing new is made, everything is recycled and remixed. Previous generations had eclectic hobbies. Collecting insects, climbing trees, playing with the kids in your street, all that fun stuff. Now everything revolves around podcasts and video essays. Why be cool and do cool people stuff when you can spend all day on Reddit and Discord, circle-jerking with countless other users about how Trump’s a dickhead or whatever? Or is that the new cool? Does it keep you warm at night? It’s all the same thing. Everything’s the same thing. That’s something that can really put the brakes on cool.
Fans loved reading Charli’s personal thoughts and meditations, as opposed to just an impersonal, promotional blurb. You could take shots at her for being overly concerned with appearing cool, but she acknowledges it, and that’s more than you could ever expect from most people in music, or the entertainment industry in general.
Haterz slammed the essay for its perceived vapidity, and lack of overall substance and depth. Some felt it lacked the qualities of a rigorous scholarly paper, not realising that Substack is not an academic journal.
Personally, I loved it. Sure, a little bit of editing wouldn’t hurt, and it has a “Cocaine’s a hell of a drug” quality that permeates the entire piece, but it gave me enough to think about over the next couple of weeks, leading me here.
It calls to mind Friedrich Nietzsche’s “God is dead” statement:
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?”
Why “God is dead” of all things? Because for all the shit she’s taken for her essay, Charli has — albeit unintentionally — created something that is not so much your standard think piece as it is a micro-theology of the secular age.
I’m serious. Philosophers, psychologists, and writers throughout history have addressed the problem of “how we shall comfort ourselves” when religion is no longer what dictates morality in society. The existentialists made this very specific philosophical problem their entire wheelhouse.
One could easily replace “God” with “cool” and make more or less the same statement, because cool functions in a remarkably similar way to religion. All the essential elements are there:
- It confers value in the sense of what matters and what doesn’t (what’s cool and what isn’t)
- It orders a fixed identity in the sense of who one is and who one isn’t (who’s cool and who isn’t)
- It creates a sense of belonging and exclusion
- In a weird way it offers transcendence, however fleeting (what’s cooler than being cool?).
I got the sense that Charli’s anxiety was less about coolness or popularity than it was about finding meaning. Cool can be interpreted here as a substitute sacred category, not so much about moral goodness or even truth, but a sort of aesthetic legitimacy. When something or someone is cool, it is chosen, set apart from the herd. And so, when cool dies as a result of being too general, she’s describing what happens when a god becomes too accessible — the sacred collapses into the profane. Cool collapses into boredom.
Nietzsche warned that when God dies, we don’t just replace him with FaCtS aNd LoGiC and go on our merry way. We replace him with idols — actors, influencers, anime waifus, chicken tendies, whatever other small gods we invent. In her essay, Charli effectively describes the death of small gods:
- Something emerges and generates meaning for a small group
- It spreads, becoming advertiser-friendly and universal
- It loses what made it special
- We mourn it for about fifteen seconds and then look for the next big thing.
Cool is not eternal. It is mortal, tragically so. Charli gives the sense that when you start to manage cool, it’s gone. Once you name the god, it’s over. It’s done.
When I look at it this way, I can’t help but read her essay in purely Nietzschean terms.
Again, when Brat was released, it had an impact that went far beyond the album as a body of work. C. G. Jung might have seen this as an archetype stripped of ritual (if I’m going to use “God is dead” as a jumping-off point, then I may as well throw a psychoanalyst or two in the mix so nobody complains later on).
Historically, meaning was stabilised through shared symbolic systems — religion, myth, rites of passage, and so on. Whoever said that people “listen to music with their eyes and not their ears” is fucking brilliant, because that describes our present situation perfectly. Artists like Charli XCX, Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, or Dua Lipa are aesthetic archetypes. I don’t want to reduce them to that, but in a culture where people are addicted to consooming, their musical talents are less important than image — the cool girl, the underground artist, the tastemaker, the arbiter of acceptability.
But there’s no orthodoxy or container for them, and with Brat, Charli found she had an archetype escaping her control. The community dissolved into mass participation, and the symbol(s) no longer belonged to anyone. Without any sense of boundaries, the Brat archetype inflated and then collapsed. The death of cool she describes is, at least in part, that loss of containment.
Sigmund Freud‘s interpretation of “The Death of Cool” would be… well, Freudian for the most part. For him, cool could just be a defence against boredom, meaninglessness, the ordinary, and/or the fear of being forgettable. Charli’s frank admission of her fears are Freudian in a sense: coolness as sublimated anxiety.
Her self-awareness kind of shoots Freud in the foot, though. He’s all about the subconscious, and she knows all too well that the god she worships is unstable and absurd… yet she can’t stop needing it.
To know something is hollow but crave it nonetheless…
If that doesn’t perfectly describe twenty-first century consumer culture, then I don’t know what will.
The Great Gatsby is worth revisiting here. F. Scott Fitzgerald understood better than anyone that when moral frameworks weaken, image and style take over. Jay Gatsby isn’t this larger-than-life figure because he’s a good person. He’s a larger-than-life figure by virtue of simply being. Cool was his green light: always just out of reach, promising fulfilment, and dissolving once attained.
Think of the man questioning if the books in Gatsby’s library were real, early on. He and the narrator, Nick Caraway, were the only ones present at his funeral at the end. Something to mull over.
Fyodor Dostoevsky would have had a field day with “The Death of Cool.” Most likely, he would have been utterly uninterested in coolness itself. He would have treated it as a symptom of a larger problem. But if you think about Charli’s essay in relation to The Brothers Karamazov, it maps quite neatly onto his deepest anxieties about modernity.
Look at Ivan Karamazov, for example. His intellectual sophistication, emotional distance, moral irony, and his refusal to commit to belief, love, or authority absolutely scream cool in the modern sense. He is sharp, sceptical, superior, and is not easily fooled. Give him a pack of Marlboro Golds and an M65 jacket, and he’d win “You Missed the Point by Idolising Them” bingo by a blowout.
Dostoevsky’s point is utterly devastating to the idea of coolness — that it is spiritually a death sentence. Ivan’s famous line in the novel is, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” This lines up with what Charli is getting at with her essay. When transcendent meaning collapses, all that’s left is taste, preference, and aesthetic judgement. Cool replaces good. But this cool detachment does not free Ivan — it unravels him; he collapses into hallucinations and madness. Feverish and unconscious, he has to be taken home by Katerina to recuperate, and his future is uncertain.
Consider the “Grand Inquisitor” story-within-a-story, which could be the most prescient thing Dostoevsky ever wrote about the modern world. The Inquisitor does not argue that people want truth or freedom, but rather security, belonging, and narrative coherence. In today’s world, cool becomes one of the ways meaning is doled out by order: Trends tell us what matters, aesthetics tell us who belongs, and virality replaces revelation.
One could draw a straight line from the Inquisitor to Charli’s lamentations about her Brat aesthetic being absorbed and co-opted by consumer brands. The system takes something that was once alive and had meaning, repackages it, and returns it to a mass audience as something palatable, a managed experience that one can neatly digest. Cool does not die because its run its course; it dies because it is controlled.
The protagonist, Alyosha Karamazov, is very uncool by comparison. The youngest brother, he is earnest, emotionally exposed, and willing to love without irony. But Dostoevsky positioned him as the moral centre because he chooses commitment over detachment, faith over taste, and love over distinction. Cool is a defence mechanism for the Ivans of the world, a means of avoiding the vulnerability that meaning demands. Charli might not be so different from Ivan in this sense, her fear of boringness figured as a fear of being vulnerable, or being seen without armour.
And then you have the Devil. Shabby, ironic, and self-aware, the Devil visits Ivan in a way that basically mocks everything about our modern sensibilities. He is witty, very meta, tired, and detached in the most performative ways possible. When he appears, the Devil does not tempt Ivan with fortune or power, but with endless ironic reflection — an endless hall of mirrors. Is this not what happens when meaning collapses into mere cleverness? Cool becomes self-parody. It’s what Charli is getting at — once everyone has a take on what the aesthetic is and how it works, it no longer does anything. Every person or institution that co-opts the Brat aesthetic becomes a mirror.
Dostoevsky would not mourn to death of cool. For him, it never truly lived.
Cool would be just a substitute for faith, love, or responsibility. Its collapse is devastating because it reveals the vacuum underneath. And yet, that collapse is absolutely necessary, he might argue. False gods must die for the real ones to appear. In The Brothers Karamazov, that despair is not the end of all things. It becomes the threshold, and Ivan must pass through the breakdown before there is any possibility or being whole.
Charli’s thesis is that cool once did something — it created a sense of community, belonging, and gave things a certain spark. Dostoevsky would agree with this, but he would add something along the lines of:
Anything that asks for devotion without offering redemption will eventually turn on its worshippers.
When you think of it that way, the love-it-or-hate-it reception to Charli’s essay makes perfect sense.
Fans love it because she’s naming a god they all secretly worship.
Haterz hate it because naming said god breaks the spell.
Charli took an awful risk publishing her essay, because to admit you care about coolness — let alone so much — is to admit fragility, vulnerability. That’s why there was such a “thinking about cool isn’t cool” clapback response. Defending one’s idol(s) is easier than the long, arduous process of reflection and introspection.
Ultimately, “The Death of Cool” doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t propose any solutions. It simply captures a moment where modern structures of meaning are visibly wobbling, and the clock is ticking. That’s probably what pissed so many people off. That moment where people say to themselves, “Oh… she just exposed us for who we really are.”
You could dismiss her essay as the cocaine-fuelled ramblings of a pop-starlet, or consider:
Charli’s essay addresses a deeper question on what gives life meaning and purpose, when established wisdom and morality no longer hold water for us.
This is not an idle question, and it’s certainly not some viral pop sensation bullshit; it’s a genuine crisis-of-meaning question, only now it’s asked in a time when the idols wear Hollywood sunglasses and post photos of their lunch on Instagram.
And since drafting this piece, I eventually gave Brat a listen and I liked it very much.
Amor fati.
Lawrence Deveney 