Kamala-nominon, brat, coconut trees and loadsa laughs

T he wave of sheer relief that broke over observers, punters, Americans and others when Kamala Harris stepped up and out as the presumptive Democratic nominee is reflected in the spray of multiple avatars she’s assumed on almost every platform.

On TikTok and even the relatively staid US national radio outlet NPR, Ms Harris was being portrayed as Kamala-nominon.

On CNN, they were discussing what it meant for the presidential hopeful to be described as “brat” by a female pop star.

On X and elsewhere, coconut trees were sprouting full grown in the most unlikely locations all because of a speech Ms Harris gave in May 2023, quoting her mother saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people, you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” The point she was trying to make was that “nothing exists in a silo”.

Meanwhile, some started a social media discussion if the palpable interest in Ms Harris was really a “femininomenon” rather than a “Kamala-nominon”. But by Tuesday, July 23, “femininomenon” seemed to have rather lost out. That’s not surprising considering the word was coined by gay Missouri singer song-writer Chappell Roan by combining “feminine” and “phenomenon”. Femininomenon, as used in her eponymous song, also means something vastly different from being a female phenomenon in the political world.

To that extent “brat” may serve Ms Harris much better with the young people on whose radar she wants to be.

It started to be used for Ms Harris when Charli XCX tweeted, “Kamala IS brat”, right after President Joe Biden announced he was abandoning the race for the White House and endorsed his vice-president’s candidacy instead.

Brat is Charli’s new album and Ms Harris’s team seems to have jumped on the pop star’s mention, quickly adopting the chartreuse colour of the album cover and using the same font, with all the text in lower-case.

Charli’s explanation of brat on social media was a model of the bring-your-whole-self philosophy, the sort of laid-back vibes of a more tolerant younger generation. A brat person, she said, might have “a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra”.

She added, “You’re just like that girl who is a little messy and likes to party and maybe says some dumb things some times”. She finished: “Who feels like herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things. But it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat”.

The original “brat” tweet was viewed 47.8 million times within 24 hours of being posted.

It spawned other fantastical excesses, not least this rhetorical question on Instagram and X:

“Why did I stay up till 3am making a von dutch brat coconut tree edit featuring kamala harris and why can’t I stop watching it on repeat”.

Go figure.

Sources:

▪ This piece was first published in Medium and re-published in PUBLIC SQUARE UK on 27 July 2024 under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. | The author writes in a personal capacity.

▪ Cover: Flickr/The White House. (Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.)