It is only slightly hyperbolic to say that everyone’s doing the Apple dance. Set to a song from Charli xcx’s summer-defining album Brat, the choreography has taken over TikTok, late-night television and beyond. Charli herself has done it, as have the stars of Twisters, Brooke Shields, Joe Jonas and Stephen Colbert.
Its popularity lies in its simplicity: a breezy, but easily replicable little dance that includes some body rolls, hands on hips, and holding an imaginary apple above one’s head. #Amishtiktok is on board, as evidenced by three girls in traditional garb dancing in a field, who, when the choreo calls for mimicking driving a car, imitate operating a horse and buggy instead.
It’s surely only a matter of time until Kamala Harris, who has adopted Brat as a campaign meme, films herself trying Apple out, too.
The dance was dreamt up by Kelley Heyer, a New York-based actor and content creator who decided to film herself making it up “on a whim”.
“The rhythm in Apple made me want to dance in a certain way,” Heyer said. “I basically woke up, stood in front of a mirror and took everything from the lyrics.”
Charli xcx’s album has come to define a carefree summer fueled by an abundance of parties and drugs. But Apple is one of its more vulnerable tracks.
“I think the apple’s rotten right to the core / From all the things passed down from all the apples coming before,” Charli sings. “I split the apple down symmetrical lines / And what I find is kinda scary / Makes me just wanna drive.”
“It’s a song about generational trauma, and I turned it into a TikTok dance,” Heyer said. “When she sings, ‘I think the apple’s rotten right to the core,’ musically, the phrase has this oozing quality, which makes you want to touch your body.”
After the dance started gaining traction on TikTok, Heyer’s partner woke her up one morning to say that Charli had filmed it. “I was half waking up, and I opened my phone and saw a million notifications saying, ‘Kelly, you gotta see this.’” Heyer said that Charli had written her a “very nice” note and offered her free tickets to her Madison Square Garden show.
Heyer says her dance, like Brat, “follows a trend of less polished content on the internet”. Charli described the brat ethos as “that girl who is a little messy … maybe says some dumb things sometimes … that girl who feels herself, but then also maybe has a breakdown, but parties through it.”
Charli’s fans have dubbed this moment “brat summer”, which they say is about leaning away from the artifice of social media perfection and into a more hedonistic era.
“To me, brat summer means not giving a fuck, but it also means being kind,” Heyer said. “Last summer was Barbie summer, and the color was pink, and this summer is brat green. During Barbie, everyone was uplifting each other and wearing pink to the movie theater, and I almost feel like brat summer has the same sentiment. We should take care of each other and be nice to each other, but this time we’re doing it in slutty little outfits.”