It’s a BRAT summer and it’s okay to be 30.
You’re not too old to be bumpin’ that.
I am turning 30 years old in two weeks and it has filled me with dread for at least the last year and a half. Since I learned I was the only one who didn’t get felt up on the marching band bus in high school I have felt like I was behind my peers. That feeling never got better as my current life (while not bad) does not look like a traditional 30 year-old and my friends who are the same age as me are gaslighting me constantly by saying things like, “I love being in my 30s. I’m more established in my career, more financially secure, I’ve got a house and a dog and a loving partner. Things are only getting easier from here!”
While that sentiment is very nice, that’s not how I feel going into my thirties. A lot of things happened to me that, while aren’t super unique to people my age, threw me off the trajectory of what being Properly Thirty looks like. Things like living with your parents until an unreasonable age because your student loan payments were so bad, being 26 during the pandemic, not having dating experience because of above mentioned pandemic and living with your parents, and of course rounding out the decade with a year of taking care of your mom dying of brain cancer are all things that will inevitably mess up a traditional life plan of what we believe a regular 30 year-old should have.
But what is a 30 year-old supposed to be? In our modern time we are not tied down to a singular life path like decades past, but there is a definite “vibe” of someone who is in their thirties, and like all vibes, you really can only tell what it is when you see it. In my opinion a typical “in-your-thirties” vibe goes as follows (and before you say anything about it, it’s mostly stereotypical and wrong, which is what generalizations usually are): you prefer to stay in most weekends instead of going out; you have at least one cat/dog/other pet and are considering getting another one; you have enough money to start buying a lot of Funko Pops; every fiscal quarter you agree to go to one late-night show that your friend’s band is in and the whole time you talk about back pain and how you’re too old to do this anymore; you Uber to the bar because you can afford to not walk there; you’ve graduated from getting the Old Style special to going to that fancy cocktail bar with a “really good” espresso martini; you can’t stay up past 10:00pm; you claim that you’re still fun but you bought a house in the suburbs and your big social event is a board game night once a month.
I get told a lot, after revealing that I am near thirty, that I don’t look 30 at all. I could say it’s because of my impeccable genes and skincare routine, but I don’t visibly look much younger than my peers who appear older—I just don’t have my shit together. At all. I’m out most nights doing comedy (while still being unestablished, which is what would make me seem older), and when I’m not telling jokes and not doing my grandma crafts (what can I say, I love crochet) I’m out at the club, dancing the night away and closing the bar down with my other friends who are my age but also do not have their shit together. When we have a collective idea of what people eight years older than us are supposed to look like, when we see someone doing the same activities as we’re doing, we just assume that they’re the same age. People who are having fun are young, and everyone just turns into a pumpkin once they hit 30 years of age and nobody who is older than that will ever have fun again. It’s a surprise to 22 year-olds when they find out that not everyone is a wife with two kids nine years out of college.
When Charli XCX’s new album BRAT dropped, I felt a shift within me. Here was this woman, my peer in age, dropping a fun dance pop album after continuously dropping fun dance pop music for the past ten years. Here was this album all about being in your early thirties, still hitting the club, still working out messy feelings that a lot of us just don’t grow out of like we’re supposed to. Listening to this album was like receiving a sign that, you know what, my 20s were not what I expected them to be but I don’t have to age out of the things I want to do when the current time is the right time for me to do it. Why do we think that bars and clubs are only allowed for people under the age of 25 when you legally have to be 21 to even enter these places? Are we only allowed four years of fun until we’re supposed to retire to our chambers and do nothing but watch Netflix until we get old and die, unseen from the rest of the world? Please.
This may just be a feeling, but I feel as though a lot of musicians, especially those who really pop off when they’re younger, tend to get into an “I’m so grown up and mature” phase in their music once they hit a certain age. Pop punk bands (my largest frame of reference—I don’t listen to that much music) love to do this: they hate their hometowns and their ex-girlfriends and I’m really feeling the energy and then ten years happen and they’re now like, “Wow my younger self was so embarrassing and angry. I am a mature adult now and I have a child whom I love and because of this my music is less angsty and thus less interesting to Renée Millette from Chicago, Illinois.” Charli, bless her, did not do this.
BRAT has top to bottom fun tracks with a bit of existential dread sprinkled in the middle really showcasing the mind of an early-30s party girl. We get a little bit of everything here. She sings about how she feels like she hasn’t reached as much success as her peers, she talks about generational trauma, she sings a few songs about strained relationships with other female musicians and how maybe she doesn’t have to like all of them without breaking the surface rules of feminism. She also wonders about how maybe her friends who settled down and had kids actually did it right, that maybe we’re not supposed to be living loud and fast forever, but then ends it with an absolute banger of a song that Charli herself describes as you’re in the bathroom and see yourself in the mirror and you’re like “oh god” but then you go down a corridor and you’re bumping along to the music and then you go down another corridor and you’re just having a great time.
In the time that I needed it the most, I (we) received an album that perfectly showcases the existential emotional turmoil of a fun night out in your thirties, and to that Charli XCX I thank you for giving me the strength to keep bumpin’ that.
The Ghost Rats have another Date Night with the Rats show Friday, July 26th, 10:00pm at the Bughouse Theater. Keep it on the radar!