Another Shot of Whiskey

How Whiskey Washed Away Brat Summer

Last year, we let the liquor talk…

“We really live in an alternate universe, don’t we?” tweeted podcaster DJ Louie XIV of Pop Pantheon on December 13th of last year, in response to the release of the Billboard Year-End Top 100 Songs of 2024. He was speaking on behalf of the pop music media elite, who repeatedly declared that this had been a year of female artist dominance. From Vogue (“It’s official, 2024 is the year of the pop girl”), to Us Magazine (“Was 2024 the Biggest Year Ever for Female Pop Stars?”), to Dazed and Confused Magazine (“2024 was the year of the pop femininomenon”) to the Ringer (“The Pop Girls Ruled 2024”), to the New York Times (“In 2024, Sapphic Stars Ruled Pop Culture”), the consensus was clear. Yet when the Billboard Year-End chart, which ranks songs by a metric that combines sales, streams, and radio airplay, was released in December, nine of the top ten songs were by men. Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” was the exception, bewilderingly only the 7th biggest song of the year. “I’ve heard the top three songs on this list in full exactly one time each.” Louie complained, referring to Teddy Swims’s “Lose Control,” Shaboozy’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” and Benson Boone’s “Beautiful Things.”

I was not quite so cocooned last year, and heard all three of these songs at least five times each (well over five for Shaboozy), but I take Louie’s point. My summer playlists were dominated by Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter, as well as a decent amount from the spring albums of Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Ariana Grande, and Beyonce. Only one song by these six women cracked the top ten. Meanwhile, three of the top ten songs mention whiskey (Shaboozy of course, plus Hozier’s “Too Sweet,” and Zach Bryan’s “I Remember Everything”).

Here’s some more cocoon-busting. I was told repeatedly that Charli XCX’s Brat was a dominant juggernaut. Everyone was supposed to be having a “Brat Summer,” and my feed was full of lime-green squares with black sans-serif font, jokes about people “working it out on the remix,” and things being “completely different but also the same.” This again was a matter of resounding elite media consensus: A search for articles with the phrase “Brat Summer” in the last six months returns thirty-three results on the New York Times website (here are five of them), and more than fifty on Vulture (here are four more). But there were no songs from Brat anywhere on the Year-End Top 100 Songs chart. There were eight whiskey songs in the top fifty.

I’m intrigued by whiskey not just because of my blog yesterday, but because I hear many of these whiskey songs as having a kind of anti-Brat energy. In a TikTok promoting the album, Charli defined Brat as "that girl who is a little messy and likes to party, and maybe says dumb things sometimes, who feels herself but then also maybe has a breakdown but parties through it… very honest, very blunt and a little bit volatile.” “It can be like, so trashy,” she said in another interview. “Just like a pack of cigs and a Bic lighter. And like, a strappy white top with no bra. That's like, kind of all you need.”

2024’s top whiskey songs sharply diverge from all of this. It’s not just that most of these songs are sung by men, although whiskey is definitely a masculine-coded beverage. These are songs about men who are depressed, fed up with the pain they’ve received from their own screw-ups (“strange words come on out of a grown man’s mouth when his mind’s broke”), from the betrayals of their exes (“I hate that I love the way them kisses taste like whiskey/ How they wake up, take on off and not even miss me”), and from the harsh indifference of the wider world (“this nine to five ain’t working, why the hell do I work so hard.”) A whiskey song protagonist is angry, he’s heartbroken, he’s crippled with regret, and a lot of the time, the thing he’s disgusted most with is himself (“I won't hate myself when the mornin' comes”). He has no energy to hit the club, party through his breakdown, process his insecurities through frenzied therapy-speak, or even be around other people at all. He’s not blunt or volatile or honest (one of these songs is literally called “Lies Lies Lies”). He wants to sit alone, drink whiskey to numb himself, and then wallow in his misery.

Not all of these songs are so bleak. “A Bar Song,” and Beyonce’s “Texas Hold’em” both describe whiskey as a unifying force that people use to seek refuge and enjoy together. In her breakout hit “Austin (Boots Stop Working)”, pop-country singer/songwriter Dasha cleverly inverts the trope by portraying a depressed, dysfunctional, whiskey-drinking man from the perspective of his fed-up ex-girlfriend. In “Too Sweet,” I think Hozier sings that he likes his whiskey neat mostly because he thought it would sound cool (and to be fair it does). But these are exceptions; tiny buoys in the vast ocean of wildly popular 2024 songs by Morgan Wallen or Zach Bryan about bitter men getting drunk alone.

In my blog on this recent surge of whiskey songs yesterday, I argued that this was largely a sign that country music had become more popular, mixed with some technical quirks of how new methods of distribution allow individual artists to send dozens of songs to the top chart all at once. Since then, a few people have proposed a more conspiratorial theory: the whiskey industry, having enjoyed a huge boom in the last few years due to the pandemic and the rise of celebrity whiskey influencers, and fearing an imminent fall back to earth, have used their music industry connections to nefariously insert their drinks into as many pop songs as possible.

Maybe. But I also can’t help but feel that there’s something significant and distinctive to 2024 about a plurality of pop music listeners guzzling down masculine, angry, depression anthems during a summer that was supposed to be all about femininity, queerness, partying, and manic, gleeful chaos. Without being too on-the-nose, Brat was closely associated with a certain person who was also not as popular as we all thought she would be.

This Sunday, the Grammys will do their best to capture the year of 2024 in music. They’ve announced that there will be performances from Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter, and Charli XCX. As of today, there has been no such announcement about Shaboozy, Zach Bryan, or Morgan Wallen. The elite consensus is that the former three artists are better, more culturally significant, and more representative of the year we just had, than the latter.

But the data doesn’t lie. My investigation into whiskey songs was mostly a goof, an exercise in taking a dumb question much further than it needed to go. But it’s also a reminder about the limitations of the elite pop music media consensus. As DJ Louie said, we were all living in an alternate universe last year. What the people really wanted was for someone to pour them out a double shot of whiskey.