Where the Fuck Is My Cocaine?

Emily VanKoughnett IS brat.

By Emily VanKoughnettNovember 14, 2024

CHARLI XCX & TROYE SIVAN PRESENT: SWEAT TOUR, Kia Forum, Inglewood, October 16, 2024.

I’m in the back seat of my friend’s boyfriend’s rental car—he totaled his Toyota leaving Hot Dog at El Cid last Sunday—which is quickly disappearing into a long line of cars outside the Forum in Inglewood. Brat Summer is long over; Demure Autumn or whatever has yet to deliver. But here we are on the doorstep of night two of the Sweat tour, Charli XCX and Troye Sivan’s joint provocation of the masses. “Not all green is created equal,” my friend whispers to me. The desperation to wear anything that could be brat green is clear. Someone in a construction vest passes by, followed by the infamous neon green shirt that reads “kamala.” Not all brats are created equal.

In 2016, Charli XCX was set to play a show in Minneapolis, my hometown. It was one of those gay boy parties that a friend of friend was throwing. It was named something like Bro Code or Swish or Cum Sluts. Her set got canceled because someone called in a bomb threat. It was too close and too soon after Pulse to joke around. Hot Boys Live (or whatever) ended up at the local crunchy co-op for an after-hours where Charli kept asking “Where the fuck is my cocaine?” as she sang her hit song “Boom Clap” amid the day-old muffins and make-love-not-war stickers. A party girl after my own party girl heart. I’ve loved her ever since.

The Sweat tour is a rave. Not like Diplo at the Sahara tent but like a DTLA warehouse party with deep house music and no known address, and which ends at sunrise, except that the show starts promptly at 8:00 p.m. I’m late to my nosebleed-adjacent seat, having stopped to get a $20 mango White Claw, and Troye is onstage giving full 2000s boy-band fantasy. Backup dancers writhe in obscurity behind clear tarps draped over metal scaffolding. The tour is a co-billing: the performance switches every few songs from Charli to Troye and back again. With her huge hair, tiny sunglasses, and rotating set of butt-forward outfits, it’s Charli’s stage from the moment the brat-green banner drops.  It doesn’t even matter that she’s lip-synching, it doesn’t matter that she’s not a classic triple-threat pop star; she’s her own one-woman party. That’s the promise and that’s what she delivers.

Under the white flashing lights, I catch glimpses of the crowd—even younger than I expected—screaming back the words of an album all about partying and the insecurities of your thirties. In the safety of my assigned seat, it all feels voyeuristic, or like someone just turned on the lights at the club. Charli has created a fantasy lifestyle that is, as pop music should be, for everyone. The fantasy is an attitude, it’s the club, it’s the fashion, it’s the drama, it’s being the It girl. And all of that comes from the very real culture and scene Charli came up in. A lifelong rave girl, she’s brought her friends like the late artist SOPHIE, Troye, A. G. Cook, the Dare, and the rest of the culture along for the ride to commercial success. It’s just that the subculture has been given the pop star treatment and now everyone, including presidential hopefuls, thinks that they are 365 party girls. That’s not a knock on Charli. Her references are stacked and she has brought this world of underground sounds she loves, and I love, into the brat-green limelight. But at the end of the day, I will always bristle at being spoon-fed along with brand strategists and the Obama daughters. Maybe I’m just bummed no one offered me a bump.

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Photo by contributor.

LARB Short Takes live event reviews are published in partnership with the nonprofit Online Journalism Project and the Independent Review Crew.