Thinkin’ About Bratz Doll Jade’s Live DJ Set…
If you follow a little thing I like to call “women’s lifestyle media,” there are reliable nostalgia tropes that we (very much including myself here) like to trot out. One such trope has been an acute and throbbing interest in the second coming of the Bratz dollz Yasmin, Cloe, Sasha, and Jade. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m kind of sick of it and YET! I would never quit it. Such is the nostalgia loop!
I don’t like that I said “sick,” it seems so negative and the dolls so cool, you know? The truth is, I’m jealous of all these Bratz articles. A few years ago, I thought “Bratz are back!” but I never did anything about it, and I have only myself to blame. This is a tough pill to swallow, and so is being the age of 31. This is where Bratz come back in, a toy brand that exists now for adults — probably more specifically women and queer people between the ages of 21-35. It makes sense the Bratz have propped open the door with their platform boots to see how we’re doing. They were sort of the adulthood we were promised and their world was oddly prescient for ours now, lifestyle brands and all. Yasmin, Cloe, Sasha, and Jade were social media before social media.
They were released in 2001, when I was 11, and they were contentious. They seemed too fast, too hot, which we now know was due to some racist and sexist ideas. Also, people love to be weird about kids’ toys, as evidenced by the party-gurl pony I wrote about. Either way, Bratz had outsold Barbie in the U.K. by 2004 and grossed $2 billion in sales their first five years in toy stores. By 2015, plagued by parent and media backlash, as well as a series of legal battles between Mattel and MGA, Bratz production was put on hiatus. This gave the girls five-ish years to grow stronger in Stylesville, publishing issue after issue of Bratz magazine. They were readying their minds and souls for a generation looking for metallics and direction.
Something that brought me joy 13 months ago was watching a Bratz doll DJ on the glass screen in front of my eyes. It was mid-pandemic, and it lit up my night! A doll DJing is exactly the sort of thing I’m into, a non-sentient situation made semi-sentient. The whole set made me scream with laughter and delight, and I think I telephoned three people. In this promotional tweet, Bratz doll Jade hovers without legs in front of a nightclub green screen. Someone is, of course, holding Bratz doll Jade so she can work on the 1s and 2s.
Unfortunately I couldn’t find the video — it was an ephemeral IG live — luckily I took 30 screenshots. Mid-pandemic it was such a funny fantasy escape to happen upon at night, just pure delight that me and around 400 other people were taken by. “the bratz account is on ig live rn and there’s a doll doing a dj set” someone who goes by @pigeonladybird tweeted on September 19, 2020. Comments ranged from “jade found the cure for corona” to “We all Bratz in here” to “She do be floating tho.”
I don’t understand my relationship to the things I love right now. The only thing that’s reliable is what makes me feel reflexively delighted, like Bratz doll Jade being held up in somebody’s bedroom to put on a lil show. Most everything that was is now back, and it feels impossible sometimes to make something new. The Bratz dolls got in trouble around Halloween for recreating a scene from Jennifer’s Body where Megan Fox singes her tongue with a lighter. This news item perfectly illustrated the cultural confusion over what’s really for kids and what’s for adults. Bratz dolls are now, it seems, for adults. 9-year-olds aren’t going to get the Cam’ron reference they just posted!
But the Bratz DJ set, it was the wackiness. I think that’s one of the only new-feeling things we can create right now — something that is perfectly random and a little chaotic where we see the fingers holding up a doll DJing alone in a glowing purple bedroom.
