I Can Hear the Men In The Room

on brat, women's art, and "technical terms"

I’m sure you’ve heard the news: it’s a brat summer. “brat” as in the new Charli XCX album that I have personally been consuming like the morning paper — top to bottom, every day, right upon waking.

But also, “brat” as in lowercase, stretched-out Arial; saying no but meaning, secretly, yes; sticky stilettos; tasting metal; riding a bike really fast with some flowers in the basket (but not during the daytime — onlookers must be thinking “who is this mysterious girl whizzing through the darkness with such a delicate, frivolous item that seems wholly useless yet somehow absolutely necessary to her at this hour?”). I won’t say “for lack of a better term” here, because I have a term and it’s right. It’s a vibe.

I came across this video of Charli the other day, a track walk-through of her song “365” in which she literally walks us through a metaphorical club scene — the universe in which the song takes place. The song pulses along, Charli narrates: “now you’re like, stumbling out of the bathroom…corridor…a little bit like ‘Where’s the Daft Punk room that we just heard?’” She oscillates between hilarious, detailed description (like the evening’s low point, when you “look like shit” and there’s an annoying friend shouting your name in a really high-pitched, elongated way) and moments of deferring to the natural energy of the song (“and it’s just like…” she’ll say, before finding herself back in the music, nodding her head to punctuate a beat that speaks for itself).

Throughout the video, producer AG Cook seems to be just on her level — adding helpful addendums or suggestions, but ultimately letting Charli do Charli. You can see why the collaboration works. Meanwhile, two older white men (names unknown and unnecessary for the purpose of this piece, sorry) take in the experience, laughing in an almost incredulous way. As the track draws to a close, Charli seems to take stock of the situation — “Sorry, I just gave a really technical explanation for what’s going on here,” she says sarcastically, before throwing her hands up into an “oh well” sort of posture.

The video made its rounds on Twitter with the caption “The way this makes PERFECT sense to me,” with stans and casual listeners alike agreeing in harmony — these songs make us feel something beyond what adjectives are serviceable for. What’s the word for ultimately having a great time but also having one bump too many, the dense music of the club feeling both like a warm friend and a stern warning? There isn’t one, really, but three-quarters of the way through 365 by Charli XCX, you feel just that.

brat is a hopeful collection of songs to me for many reasons. In the age of micro-individualism, pay-to-play fashion trends and incoherent aesthetic movements, transmitting a complex yet fully comprehensive vibe is more important than ever. brat is a confident album sonically, even as it deals with concerns around identity, jealousy, and self-image lyrically. Charli clearly has a vision, and that vision transmits feeling.

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I am also grateful for brat because it’s bringing back a bit of honesty to our (seemingly endless) online conversation about girlhood and women’s relationships. I have personally been very curious to see how the pendulum will swing back from the “i’m-just-a-girl-deer-jpg-also-every-girl-i-know-is-a-tiny-internet-angel” era. I suspect it’s beginning now, with something like these Charli songs. I’m not a girl’s girl, she says (implicitly but not literally, “Mean Girls” was enough internet jargon for one record). Sometimes I want to fuck your boyfriend and have your career and I definitely am a little in love with you but in a way that makes me kind of hate you. And I think you feel the same way about me.

Charli has made me feel a little bit brave — brave enough to try to shoehorn a piece I’ve had sitting in my drafts for the last few weeks into this larger conversation.

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At the end of the video, when Charli apologizes for her “technical” explanation, I wonder how she’s really feeling. Is she genuinely sheepish at her eccentric performance of her own art? Is she trying to put any quizzical viewers on the outside — yeah, this is my own weird magic, and if you don’t get it, you just don’t get it? Is it a combination of both?

In any case, I understand the impulse — at least when it comes to being a woman in the music space. If you want to make a song sound good and you have limited production experience, statistically, you are going to need a man.

This is a bit of an uncomfortable bind, one in which women come floating through with all the esoteric feeling, and men hammer the vision into place with their boyish tools. I’m reminded of a favorite Ursula LeGuin quote:

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”

Like any good feminist, I of course agree. But there is something ultimately true and real about this common women artist/male producer dynamic, especially when it comes to new singer-songwriter records of the last few years. I have trouble connecting with some of these records because of one simple, unfortunate fact: I can hear the men in the room.

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In music, sometimes the goal is to transmit feeling and sometimes the goal is to make something technically perfect. These are not mutually exclusive by the way — it is often necessary for art to be technically excellent so that the viewer or listener can access the full potential of feeling without being distracted by any looseness that goes on. “Gives You Hell” by the All American Rejects, for instance (and no I do not feel embarrassed pulling this example), is one of the best-mixed songs I’ve ever heard. The guitar tones are clean without being sterile, and the gang vocals come in such that, while listening, one feels that their rage is not messy but logical. The song works because it is technically perfect.

Other times, the looseness is precisely the point, and not in a “oh I’m so cool I don’t even have to care kind of way,” but in the way that a take will feel so existentially locked-in that the specifics of the sound cease to matter. It becomes something greater, something that can’t be zoned in on or defined, a song that finds its listeners in the same way it was created — “I can’t even really say what about this song is so special, you can just feel it.”

We’re in the digital age of connection and the increasing democratization of music. This is sometimes bad but mostly extremely cool and good. This means that women artists who may not have previously been connected with other collaborators (because those networks have historically excluded women) can find people to play on their records and produce their songs (and, of course, learn to produce themselves although that is still statistically very rare). It means that girls writing songs on guitar in their bedrooms could bring those songs to people who could produce them out into radio-ready tracks.

There are plenty of women artists who have a fantastic grasp on every technical element of their work, but there are also plenty who don’t. This is partially because we’ve been shut out of these areas of the art, those deemed to be the responsibility and skillset of the men, and partially because we believed that was true. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat in a room with women peers in the space, all tossing around the same sentiment: “God, I really wish I would just learn how to produce.”

I have worked closely with men in the music space but mostly I don’t. Not because I believe that women have this innate, mystical knowledge beyond male comprehension, but because I choose to work with people who listen well in all situations, and usually those people are women. A producer must obviously have a good ear in a physical sense, but also in a relational sense — can you listen to me as I’m speaking to you, and can you help me represent the feeling I’m trying to transmit?

Sometimes I struggle to connect with singer-songwriter records made by women because I can physically hear the men in the room trying to strangle a certain tone out of a guitar more than they are trying to represent the feeling of the song. It is easy to be overrun by the impulses of men in the room, especially when you can’t really explain exactly why you are making a creative decision in the technical terms that will register with them. A lot of times this is because the decision is beyond technical terms. A lot of times this is because men have difficulty, when invested in a project, committing to it on an emotional level — coming to an arrangement to serve, not even the artist who created it, but the higher spiritual consciousness through which all art is transmitted. They want to get the toolbox out and start tinkering, and because they know the tools, many women artists are inclined to let them. 

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When Charli sarcastically says that her 365 breakdown was in the most “technical terms,” she is getting out in front of an embarrassment women artists have always had to pre-empt — that sometimes, things feel right in a way that cannot best be described through language. It’s why we make use of other mediums, it’s a language that necessarily cannot seamlessly flow into easy, verbal explanation. When I listen to brat, I hear Charli in the room.

I don’t think that this kind of artistic connection is specific to women —certainly not—, but the tireless justification and explanation of our artistic choices in acceptable, “logical” terms is. While I think we should definitely all be looking to work with more women producers, and as women ourselves learn to produce, we should also resist the urge to put clouds in shoeboxes. If you’re a woman artist, remember that you brought these people into the room. Sometimes, people will not understand why it is important to you for the music to be a certain way. You can get used to saying “it’s alright if you don’t understand it, because I do.” You don’t have to use their words. You are an artist because you create your own.

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At the end of the day, if every creative decision had to be justified in logical, rational terms, we would be living in a world without “that’s that me espresso.” And that, to me, is a world I want no part of.