THE MOMENT is Charli xcx’s brat summer mockumentary, directed by Aidan Zamiri. I was sat in the denim reupholstered seats at Rich Mix with a large glass of red wine in my hand. I watched girls with city bags and slickback buns traipse in around me. I thought about how this was all very meme account starter pack. Then the film started and I was blasted with acid green, cyan blue titles. Charli xcx in black and white, sliding round on a transparent floor. ‘It feels like my eyes are getting jetwashed’, I thought.

The Moment starts at the arse-end of brat Summer, Charli is planning an arena tour. The record label wants the whole brat thing to last forever, so now Charli’s stuck. Does she let brat die and move on to other things? That would be the creatively healthy thing to do, but before brat she was languishing in semi-obscurity. This album was a Moment, propelling her to the culture’s pinnacle! Letting go of it now feels too soon, even if hanging on feels cringe. Charli films a ‘what’s in my bag’ for Vogue; does a deal for a Brat-themed credit card; meets and greets. The label forces her to work with a pushy filmmaker called Johannes (Alexander Skarsgard as a namaste white south african) to make an Amazon Prime concert film. He butts heads with Charli’s long time creative director (Celeste) until it all bubbles over — Charli throws the towel in. She goes to Ibiza for a spa break, runs into Kylie Jenner, posts misinformation about the brat credit card, causes the credit crunch(?), comes back to London to find that the label has fired Celeste and given Johannes free reign (oversized glittery lighters, aerial aerobics choreography, pyrotechnics). Alienated from her music, which has been turned into something different and wrong, she gives up, lets the label/Johannes do what it wants, and the film ends with a fake advert for Brat Live!, a glitzy showstopper that feels more like the Eras Tour.

I left Rich Mix and walked home, and as I walked my thoughts appeared to me in a straight line.

I know it’s not true but I’m sure this story started from a real place. I imagine Atlantic (Charli xcx’s real life label) were pissing themselves with excitement at the totalitarian cultural takeover of brat. The music industry is a machine-at-large (like the art industry, and fashion, and all the other ones), and none of them care about the intricacies of cultural production. They care about making money. They are conservative, risk-averse, uninterested in experimentation and innovation. They don’t care about artists who want to make art. Or they do, but only if the art you make is monetisable.

If this was an Industry-industry and artists were actually directly making a tangible material products (like cinnamon buns, toasters, roof tiles) then this’d all be very clear cut. But it’s not, because the cultural industry functions along an axis of meaning and desire. What do you want to make, what do you want to engage with, what do you want this to mean? It’s a deeply unpredictable market, none of it is rational. The industry and all the bozos in charge are completely reliant on artists making something that they have no ability to produce for themselves.

In The Moment, this is laid out for us very clearly. Before the big meeting with the Big Bitchy Boss, the UK label people realise they’re all wearing the same thing, copying each others’ poser outfits. When Charli speaks they nod like sycophants, unable to tell her the truth when she asks for their opinion. Johannes tries so hard to understand what brat is, but he misses the mark every time. Celeste understands brat implicitly, her & Charli speak without explaining themselves. The film presents The Artist’s Work as a practice of being-in-the-know, having the right taste, the right vision, being able to make the right choices. The Artist is uniquely capable of producing something valuable because it’s cool.

And here is my disdain: coolness is a kind of death sentence. Calling something cool is like, effectively dismissing it. But it’s also a shorthand we use to talk about things that feel exciting, energetic. Things that rip through the culture, pull people in. Coolness is a volatile quality, the irrational actor in that unpredictable cultural market. Once you produce something cool, there’s a ticking clock — you become aware of its impending death. Once you produce something cool, an entire industry descends around it and tries to extract money from it, turning it into a product, and then it dies.

It is too easy to say the cool thing dies because the industry descends and extracts money from it, the extraction of money is the fatal blow to something as fragile as coolness — that feels like only half the truth.

I think algorithmic social media has flipped the cultural industry into a hell dimension: we are all consumers, producers have to beg for resources, the people with all the power and money are tapped in the head. None of the industry bozos are COOL — they can’t even put together an outfit, let alone a coherent desirable cultural product. Johannes cannot get to grip with something as abstract and wordless as a vibe. They are middlemen, glorified office workers — they aren’t cool themselves, just cool by proximity. In these deficiencies, they should be precarious — but in the context of the industry-hell-dimension, they have all the power and money, so somehow they’re the stable ones.

But it’s not the case that despite this hell dimension scenario, cool things get made! If artists want to produce something within this hell industry, they have to make it cool. There is something about coolness as a quality that I feel deeply disdainful about, because it feels like a shiny gimmick, a compromise. It feels like coolness only appeals to people who need to co-opt it to have it. That’s the value of its function in relation to desire: you want it because you do not have it yourself. And that feels like a very hollow way to engage with culture, but that’s not where the film ends.

The Moment was affirming because it presented a vision of the music industry as an industry: clueless bozos with too much influence, fragile artists with no agency over the legacy of the things they make. This is plopped into a cinematic container that’s abrasively simple, like the Lizzie Macguire Movie, Spiceworld, or Viva S Club but for adults 25-35 who really like Negronis (and not just because everyone else is ordering them). But my disdain! — The Moment was interesting because it presented a vision of how coolness functions as a commodity and how it might be destroyed. When Charli meets Kylie Jenner at the Ibiza spa, Kylie says ‘just when people are sick of you, that’s when you double down!’. Before Charli goes on stage for the first night of Johannes’ Brat Live! monstrosity, she records a voice note to Celeste that doubles up as a soppy end-of-film monolgue. She says ‘it’s not chic to be the last one to leave the party, but I just never want the party to end!’ Coolness is volatile because it dies. Maybe that is the only way to be cool and evade the death sentence: keep going even though it’s dead. When it’s uncool, ugly, bad or cringe — I guess then the art is finally all yours again.