A girl at a party is not necessarily a party girl.
A party girl is a girl who is always at a party.
There is an existential dimension.
Sometimes you stay up until you hear the first birds, and it is a devastating moment—even though it is also a privilege.1
Sometimes you stay up so late that you see people walking to work as you go home, and you feel sorry for them.2
For the party girl, the party is both a ruinous substance and a preservative chamber, a drop of amber.
The party sharpens other dimensions of life by making them more painful.3
Like the true nature of being, all parties are essentially good, though clouded to some degree by impurities and flawed interpretations.
At every party, there is a room where something bad is happening.4
This bad thing is nevertheless part of the party’s essential goodness.
Yet the party is a room that gets smaller and smaller.
The party girl is either the last one to leave, or the first.5
As in the ages of man, the party girl is a creature who walks on two legs, then four, then three: entering the dance floor, crawling on the dance floor, being helped away, limping with a twisted ankle.6
Being a party girl is like being a ballerina: At a certain point, you age out because your physicality demands it.
When you age out, your physicality is already permanently altered in some way.
And yet, you will always move within an inherent state which has been so rehearsed that it becomes real.
As such, party girls get older but do not necessarily retire.
It is almost as if, once a party girl has attained an aura of unending party, she must leave the club and be a party everywhere.
I exist in a constant state of party.
I will dance to anything, including the music that plays at the gas pump.
Including the pilot light on the stove.7
It is possible, as Joan Didion said, to stay too long at the fair. It is likewise possible to stay too long at the party.
Further, a party is not actually a party unless it is possible to stay there too long.
You can only be young forever if you die that way.
Party girls do not have mothers.8
Party girls usually have an abundance of flammable dresses, and surprisingly utilitarian objets in their purses.9
I never took psychedelic drugs because I suspect I don’t really need them. Everything already seems incurably alive to me.
The party is a collaboration in which individual identity temporarily dissolves.
You can’t call yourself a brat. It has to come from your boyfriend or your baby sitter.
Yet a party girl must be self-defined. If someone else calls you a party girl, it is a grave insult.
This is because it’s a question of innocence.10
None of which matters in the slightest.
Contrast: the derangement of the senses vs. the hard glare of a convenience store in the middle of the night.11
A cultural moment is not really worth discussing.12
South Governor Street, Iowa City. Mathilda Street, Pittsburgh. Rountree Drive, Austin. On stupid sidewalks everywhere.
Not necessarily distinct experiences.
Nausea. Gray skies. Bright supermarket aisles. One’s “job.”
By “a bad thing,” I mean a snuff film playing on a TV plugged in on the floor.
In the latter case, because she is going to a better party.
In the cover art for the single “360,” you can see Charli XCX’s underwear.
Try it; it slaps.
I offer a completely unsubstantiated reading which I am nevertheless confident of: that the the “you” in “Von Dutch” (“It’s OK to just admit that you’re jealous of me”) is the same as the mother in “Apple” (“Feels like you never understand me so I just want to drive/to thee airport/thee airport.”)
The genius of brat is that Charli XCX has succeeded in making a hypersigil rather than an album. It is probably not her “best record” in a songwriting sense. But it is relentlessly idiosyncratic and specific. Her voice is forward in the mix instead of sounding like a melting toy radio in the next room. The marketing is also relentlessly idiosyncratic and specific, but it creates a sense of place and event in the record—a sense of party. brat is a party you can go to. The remix record even moreso. A temporary dissolving of identity. How can you tell brat is successful as a party? Because everybody wants to be there.
There is no such thing as a “party woman.” Or for that matter a “party man.”
The delay on “Club Classics” and “Von Dutch” is so laggy that it makes you feel like you are hearing them at a party in a huge warehouse where the sound is so massive that it attains a curvature, like the earth’s. They’re both addictive tracks because we crave the return of the hard downbeat.
Because discussing it is like standing outside of the party, afraid to go in.
Thus concludes my Charli XCX series. Thank you for reading. Next week: the triumphant return of your regular bibliomancy forecast. <3