On a new Brat remix of “Sympathy is a knife,” Charli XCX and Ariana Grande talk through the sharp knife of fame, exploitative media coverage, public perception, and harsh body criticism — a knife that cuts us all, in the end.
Charli played the track for the first time at Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, NY on Thursday, Oct. 10 for a late afternoon listening party attended by a few hundred fans and journalists from various outlets, including Teen Vogue. An hour-and-a-half train plus a half-hour shuttle from New York City, and we arrived at Storm King on the most perfect crisp fall day to hear the brat singer's new album, a remix titled Brat and it's completely different but also still brat. Classic.
Organizers gave out free t-shirts (“art" but in Brat font), sliders and pizza, and green Brat drinks as people gathered around the massive 30 foot tall angular art installation of the remixed album tracklist (made by Charli XCX, built by Storm King, and creative directed by Imogene Strauss), where the sound system played through the original Brat album start to finish. When Charli arrived around 5 p.m. EST, the platform Twitch live-streamed the show for viewers online as she greeted the crowd and danced on the small stage as she introduced the new record and talked about her process of making the remixes.
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“One of the reasons that I wanted to do this project was because I feel like it's really cool to show the infinite possibilities of dance music and of music in general,” Charli said. “When a song comes out, there are still so many different versions of that song that could be made using just a tiny element of the production from the original, or a tiny reference to a lyrical concept or a literal lyric. I just feel, it can all be like completely deconstructed and put back together again. Why not? Why be like, ”it's the album and it's done"?
She then played the Grande track — an appropriate remix for Grande to jump on, given the speculation the original is about a certain other massive pop star. The pre-chorus and chorus share this theme of people watching you rise only to root for your downfall; the “sympathy” is a knife, but in this version so is the “expectation” from seemingly everyone.
Grande's verse, meanwhile, seems to allude specifically to the controversies that have followed her the past couple of years, parts of harmful fan culture, and more recent comments about her body that she recently addressed.
The song follows a bit in the footsteps of “Girl, so confusing featuring Lorde," in which Charli and Lorde sort out past miscommunication in the context of celebrity pressure; Lorde specifically references a “war with my body” and a reluctance to be photographed, and alludes to the ways musicians can be exploited: “It's you and me on the coin/The industry loves to spend.”
It's interesting to see Charli essentially reflect on the massive success of Brat and what the aftermath of that has been like for her so far on the remixed album. It is directly shaped by Brat summer and the eventual hangover (she would call it Brat autumn). Several songs are reworked entirely, including the now even more deeply sad “I might say something stupid featuring the 1975 and jon hopkins," on which Matty Healy also reflects on being “famous but not quite.”
In all, Brat and it's completely different but also still brat is an apt album after a year of stars — including, foremost, Chappell Roan — speaking openly about fame and mental health, and the mounting pressures of being a person up for public consumption. It feels like it's all building to something, some kind of reckoning, some change in how we appreciate art and artist, and treat each other online and off. It has to.
