“Von Dutch, cult classic, but I still pop (politics)”
Avid fans of the Mayor of London’s Instagram account will this week have come across a glaring, lime green, blurry graphic reading ‘ulez is working’ on their feeds.
Seemingly incongruous amongst Sadiq Khan’s otherwise polished grid of Instagram content, the post will have left many of the Mayor’s 227,000 followers scratching their heads. But those of us familiar with what pop artist Charli XCX has labelled ‘brat summer’ will have recognised it immediately.
Charli XCX’s sixth studio album, brat, has taken social media by storm since its release in June, with the record’s lime green, low-resolution artwork forming the basis for a myriad of brat generator memes.
Following confusion from some listeners on the exact meaning of brat, which has already earned its place in the colloquialisms of Zoomers across the world, Charli took to TikTok to explain. In her own words, brat is “just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things sometimes, who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but kind of parties through it”.
After President Joe Biden’s recent decision to withdraw from the 2024 US presidential election and subsequent endorsement of Vice-President Kamala Harris as the official new Democratic nominee, Charli XCX simply tweeted “kamala IS brat”. Shortly thereafter, the official Biden-Harris campaign account, ‘Kamala HQ’, decided to jump on the bandwagon, changing its banner picture to ‘kamala hq’, in the Arial font style of the brat album cover.
Brat summer is just the latest in a string of viral phenomena that have, even momentarily, appeared to bridge the gap between young audiences and politicians eager to engage them.
‘Pop-politics’, how pop culture influences and shapes how we understand, experience, and practice politics, has become a significant, impossible to ignore, part of our democracy.
But how have viral trends become the meeting place for this kind of communication and, more importantly, do they even work?
Youth voter turnout at the 2019 UK general election was worryingly low, with less than half of all 18-24-year-olds having exercised their right to vote. With this in mind, the social media teams of various major parties took to their phones ahead of this year’s general election, to begin a dogged campaign to try and win back those precious youth votes.
While Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak, and other key party leaders lobbied for support using debate and rhetoric, their teams engaged instead on the fresh battlegrounds of X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok. Rather than words and statistics, their tools were Canva, low-resolution screenshots, and the incorrect use of POV (Point of View).
Many of the viral trends that parties were trying to mimic were weeks or even months old: a mistake that any social media manager worth their salt would look to avoid. As we all know, the nature of memes and viral moments is fickle; reactive and temporary, they are over almost as soon as they happen.
Comment sections throughout the campaign were rife with suggestions that the posts “didn’t quite land” and were a sign of parties “getting desperate” by resorting to “sad marketing” techniques. This seems to reflect a broad distaste for this kind of engagement amongst the very audience they are trying so clumsily to convert.
There is no doubt that politicians and parties poking fun at themselves can be a fantastic PR technique – when executed well. Relatability can be one of the most important drivers in political engagement, but it requires authenticity, and Zoomers and Millennials who have lived their entire lives through the prism of the internet can smell an inauthentic meme a mile away.
2024’s record low voter turnout may be an indicator that memes are simply not the secret weapon parties need to rally young voters to their side.
However, The Green party have had a strong base of youth support for many years and performed remarkably well amongst young voters in the 2024 general election. They have not shied away from participating in the ‘memeification’ of politics in choosing to hop on the brat hype on polling day, early in the brat revolution and well before any other UK parties or politicians engaged in the trend.
Unlike content produced by parties like the Conservatives and Labour, whose popularity amongst young voters in is comparative decline, the Green’s participation in brat summer felt organic and timely considering the inevitable expiration date on all trends.
Awkward attempts from politicians to manufacture a viral moment or post a meme in July that was born and died on TikTok in April, only perpetuates the perception of politicians amongst the youth as fundamentally out of touch. Participation in any aspect of youth culture as a way to appeal to voters needs to be light-hearted, responsive, and spontaneous, rather than clunky, contrived, and outdated, in order to work.
So, should politicians continue to try and engage in meme culture, or should they leave the comic sans font and TikTok slideshows alone? Should Kamala Harris remind audiences that they in fact did not fall out of a coconut tree in her inaugural speech if she wins as Democratic candidate in November? (Google that one). Will the Labour party update its colours from traditional rose red to brat green at its annual party conference in September? Is Keir Starmer So Julia enough to convince younger doubters of his leadership credentials?
If this year’s general election and the Mayor of London’s bratification of ULEZ are anything to go by, online trends and pop-culture phenomena in politics are here to stay. Only time will tell whether parties and politicians will be able to organically get to grips with this baseline language of the internet, and if it will serve its intended purpose.