Ringing in Brat Summer at Medieval Times
On the Blending of Sincerity and Irony
I kicked off my Brat Summer in one of the most fitting ways one can: at a Medieval Times in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. From Manhattan, one can travel to the Lyndhurst Medieval Times via a twenty-minute train from Penn Station followed by a ten-minute Uber from Secaucus Junction Station. Lyndhurst Castle (est. 1990) is a beige and red structure that looks like a Chuck-E-Cheese on the bottom and a castle on the top, complete with tan, modular turrets and a red-and-yellow striped awning at its entrance. Similar to how a moat surrounds a real castle, the Lyndhurst Medieval Times is surrounded by a sprawling parking lot, allowing it to stand proudly and singularly alongside the NJ-3 expressway.
I made the journey to this Medieval Times last weekend for a friend’s birthday party. For those unfamiliar with the franchise, Medieval Times is an American dinner/theater experience that features medieval-style entertainment, including sword-fighting and jousting. Attendees watch actors duke it out with plastic swords on sad horses while sitting in a 1000-person arena - Gladiator-style - and eating chicken legs and baked potatoes with their bare hands. Patrons are given free paper crowns, each with a color corresponding to the color of the knight that they’re supposed to root for (there’s a Yellow Knight, Red Knight, Blue Knight, etc.). You also have the option to purchase small pennants with your team’s color to wave as the actors play fight.
Medieval Times is a uniquely American experience in all senses - beginning with the fact that special perks and statuses attached to it come with egregious upcharges. Before you enter the arena, you have to wait in a feudal-themed waiting room - complete with faux-iron chandeliers, plastic candelabras, fake family crests, and many, many things to purchase. There is a “Royal Armory” where you can buy plastic swords and wandering merchants selling light-up magic wands and hatchets. For an extra fee, you can have Queen Doña Maria Isabella knight you with a chosen title, fellow guests yelling “hip hip hooray!” as your commemorative photo is snapped. A vodka soda with lime is $20, excluding the neon chalice that they’ll somehow manage to upsell you on.
The allure of Medieval Times hinges on submission. As soon as you cross the threshold of this type of establishment, your happiness relies on how much you’re able to commit to the bit. For some, this means committing to the idea that you’re a 14th-century European nobleman, bellowing down at sword-fighting knights from your throne, chicken grease gleaning on your jowls. It means being wholeheartedly impressed by the horses standing on their hind legs and bowing before you, a handler in footman’s garb thwap-ing their ankles with a small whip.
The other kind of submission one can undergo in Medieval Times is an ironic kind. It involves committing to the idea, with almost believable earnestness, that this is impressive entertainment and food, that the animals aren’t suffering, and that all this money is well-spent. Such submission requires ironic city dwellers to surrender their high-brow sensibilities and adopt the mindset of a suburbanite celebrating their fifth or fiftieth birthday. Putting the experience on your Instagram story with the sound on. Wearing your paper crown as you take the ACE train line home from Penn Station. Reveling in the glances from young, cool onlookers, dazzled by your ability to appear disaffected by the countless things to do in the city, by the numerous restaurants, bars, and clubs TikTok tells you to “run, don’t walk!” to. You smile smugly as you transfer to the L because you’ve done it! You’ve dove headfirst into what you believe to be the underbelly and made the low brow high brow in the process.
One might similarly call me ironic for comparing the Medieval Times experience to the type of lifestyle British pop singer Charli XCX sings about on her latest album BRAT (2024). They might think I’m even more ironic for claiming to draw this comparison with sincerity. But if BRAT has taught me one thing, it’s that magic blossoms at the intersection of earnestness and irony, when the lines between the two virtues blur to the point of them becoming indistinguishable.
Ever since Charli XCX released BRAT on June 7, 2024, it’s been impossible for me to scroll through Twitter without encountering the unmistakable shade of neon green that adorns the album’s cover art. The cover is simplistic, but loud - featuring a nauseating shade of fluorescent lime green and the word “brat” in fuzzy, narrow Arial font smack dab in the center. Aside from it being a genius marketing device (eye-catching, easily reproducible, etc.), the BRAT album art is an impeccable introduction to the odyssey that ensues upon pressing play.
Charli has said herself that BRAT is a club album - an album to dance to, to get messy to, to feel in the walls and in your chest as it blares from club speakers. And it certainly delivers on that promise - it’s impossible to sit still when any of these songs are playing, particularly “360,” “Club classics,” and “Von dutch.” I will jump if AG made it! Yet, amid masterful electronic production is raw songwriting that punches listeners in the gut. On this self-proclaimed dance album, Charli is doing more than just partying. She walks listeners through her physical insecurities, her interpersonal conflict with family and friends, and her qualms about not reaching the level of commercial success she often believes she should. She reconciles girl drama with Lorde on “The girl, so confusing version with lorde” and contemplates whether she should abandon her career prospects to have a child on “I think about it all the time.” On “Sympathy is a knife,” after divulging her social anxiety, Charli brashly posits “Why I wanna buy a gun? / Why I wanna shoot myself?”
The confessions on BRAT are intermixed with hyper-pop beats and pleas to “put your hands up.” The listening experience is akin to dispelling your life story to a girl you just met in the corner of a party, shouting to be heard over the pumping bass while the people around you dance themselves to exhaustion. The disclosures spill out of you like water from a raincloud. You feel a twinge of embarrassment as your mind zooms out of your body for a second. But then again, made more vulnerable by substances and sweat, it dawns on you that there’s nothing explicitly wrong with tenderness. As you glance around the room, you drunkenly realize that everybody in the party - the ones screaming and dancing, the ones leaning against the wall, the ones emerging from the bathroom in tears - all of them, have a story. Everyone you pass on the street has dreams and has experienced atrocities that color the way they move through the world. Yet, none of this richness comes to the surface. Why not be earnest? Why not tell your friends you love them with ardor? Why not listen to a stranger? Why not choose to view the small things - view everything - as romantic?
These tenets - earnestness without shame, the blending of sincerity and irony - are the pinnacles of BRAT and, incidentally, the underpinnings of “Brat Summer” - a season for which so many online are hungry. Social media users have always been plagued with presentational concerns - these considerations have changed shape over time, but never fully disappeared. In the 2010s, there was value in the highly polished, meticulously thought-through social media presence - photos on one’s Instagram grid had a distinct colorway or theme, and pictures of oneself or one’s surroundings could appear highly posed and premeditated. Many hands on hips, toothy grins, and carefully drawn liquid liners.
The global pandemic that kickstarted the 2020s, in part, caused social media presences to waver more natural - more “candid.” We’re living through “unprecedented times,” who cares about perfectly contoured cheekbones and color-coordinated feeds? “No makeup makeup” fell in favor of the masses, as did “photo dumps.” While these presentational choices appear more nonchalant, they still, naturally, have a tailored quality - one’s life still has to appear attractive, just effortlessly attractive.
However, the Brat Summer movement appears to be collapsing these aesthetic concerns altogether, or at least attempting to, by way of making everything - love, partying, conflict, inter-turmoil - fun. Making everything beautiful. No song on the album illustrates this better than “Everything is romantic,” which opens with dreamy strings and the lines “Bad tattoos on leather tan skin / Jesus Christ on a plastic sign / Fall in love again and again / Winding roads doing manual drive.” The pleasure, the suffering, the desire, the insecurity - it makes us all whole. It makes us all human. Amid an online landscape that simultaneously demands beauty and authenticity, choosing to make everything beautiful - even the “ugly,” even that damn shade of neon green - feels freeing.
As summer turns to fall, Brat Summer will inevitably fade, and so too will its teachings. The scale will tip in another direction. We will once again draw clear distinctions between the beautiful and the ugly, the high brow and the low brow. We’ll pack up our earnestness and place it on a high shelf, as reticence becomes en vogue. As sure as the tide will pull in and out of the shore, trends will rotate. But for now, Jesus Christ on a plastic sign, paper crowns at Medieval Times, all of it, is beautiful. For now, everything is romantic.
Great connection , really liked this !
this is so great!!