“I don’t wanna go all natural, I want electronic,” sings Demi Lovato on her cracking ninth album, It’s Not That Deep. After a couple of rockier records, the Disney graduate’s recent embrace of frenetic EDM beats – dancing around her emotional messiness like a handbag – has sparked a minor debate online: is she trying to emulate Charli XCX’s Brat summer? Or was she (gasp!) the OG Brat? In a widely shared article for Paper magazine, Ivan Guzman argues that the former Disney Channel star grew up straddling the roles of pop princess (flashing her wholesome smile on As the Bell Rings) while making emo rock and guesting on EDM hits in “the golden days of pop girl rebellion, when Lindsay Lohan was wearing an ankle monitor and Sky Ferreira’s mugshot leaked”.
To anybody over 30, the debate sounds daft; hectic hedonism has always been a thing. While it might not always have been as socially permissible for women to live it out loud, I imagine back in neolithic times some wolfskin-clad babe will have flipped off the tribal elders, recklessly shagged a medley of the wrong people round the back of her family cave, and rubbed ash from the fire around her eyes while throwing defiant shapes to what Lovato now calls the “electric energy” of a big old thunderstorm.
