Recent artists are reimagining salsa’s foundational two-part form, reflecting the influence of popular music and contemporary modes of listening. Flores (2016), Washburne (2008), and Manuel (2016) have defined salsa’s traditional formal sections as a large two-part form consisting of the son (the sung theme consisting of verse and refrain) and montuno (larger section consisting of smaller sections with improvisatory singing, call and response in the smaller montuno, and instrumental breaks. Artists are now creating hybridized forms in salsa that are indicative of popular musical influence. In this paper, I show the ways salsa has begun to adapt to the current global music market, or perhaps, how the global music market has begun to incorporate salsa’s sonorous qualities. I provide a case study of four songs to show the various ways artists are approaching the formal hybridization of salsa in the digital age. I demonstrate how the sonic qualities of the traditional montuno section (loud, lively brass, choir, expressive solo singing) take on the rhetorical function of a pop chorus (Adams 2019). I propose that the hybridization of salsa's sounds with verse/chorus form appeals to broader (ie: not Latino) audience, enables accessible listening for shorter attention spans, and reflects a shift in market values for consumption purposes. Most songs are significantly shorter than traditional salsa, which indicates marketability for popular music listeners and those with short attention spans. Shorter lengths also indicate the mode of consumption – salsa has shifted from a public, lengthy listen to a digital, individualized capital commodity.

In June 2024, Charli xcx released her sixth studio album, Brat, followed shortly thereafter by a remix album, entitled, Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat. Featuring the same tracklist, the remix album reimagines each song through collaborations with a wide range of artists that span a variety of genres. Recent remix practice favors a track’s formal structure and vocal track, opting instead to alter elements such as timbre, texture, and instrumentation (Adams 2016; Smith 2020). In the Brat remixes, Charli xcx departs from these conventions, instead using the remix to alter the temporal and affective identity of each track. Eduardo Navas’s (2018) idea of remix as interpretive reimagination offers a useful lens for understanding how Charli xcx’s remixes transform the many tracks’ underlying infrastructure. Rather than preserving a source track’s formal logic, she reshapes the tracks’ teleological trajectories, affective qualities, and narrative arcs, often to the point that the source material is no longer immediately aurally recognizable. In this way, Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat reframes remix practice itself, positioning it as a site of formal and temporal innovation rather than one of surface substitution. Drawing on Drew Nobile’s (2022) telos principle, which understands pop music form as an organized motion of initiation, buildup, and arrival, I argue that these remixes can be heard as actively reworking musical time. I identify two broad remix strategies in Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat: (1) reassigning teleological function to formal sections of the source material, giving them new roles within the remix (e.g., “Talk talk,” “360,” “365,” and “Club classics”) and (2) stretching teleological cycles to reorganize a track’s formal trajectory (e.g., “B2b” and “Girl, so confusing”). Taken together, these remix strategies foreground remix as a practice in which formal function and musical identity are renegotiated, allowing familiar materials to assume new or altered roles across versions.

brat by Charli XCX not only inspired 2024’s “brat girl summer” but also consecrated contemporary trends of “after-chorus” modules in recent dance-pop, including codas (X), outros (O), and postchoruses (Z); all the while embodyibg the affective potential of club music. Exploring themes of fame, inadequacy, hedonism, and—above all else—existential anxiety, brat combines EDM, hyperpop, and earlier dance-pop and uses repetition, timbral distortion, and (most relevant to this paper) “after-the-end” formal sections to musically embody Charli’s symptoms of anxiety and coping techniques, including self-distraction techniques and derailing thought spirals.

But what exists after the end? Recent work by Biamonte (2014) and Nobile (2020) have sufficiently explored Caplinian formal functions of beginning, middle, and ending within U.S. popular music from the mid-century through the 90s. However, an exploration of “after-the-end” material remains elusive despite 2020s dance pop becoming increasingly infatuated with after-chorus modules. Continuing the work of Spicer (2004), Barna (2021), and Stroud (2022), I broadly define Z against other members of its after-chorus cohort and theorize their collective after-the-end, or “epilogic” function.

I then explore formal storytelling in brat by Charli XCX (2024) and its remix album brat and it’s completely different but also still brat (2024) through their use of after-chorus modules. I evoke Jean-Paul Sartre’s commentary on existentialism, suicide, and man’s fear of death in order to explain Charli’s simultaneous fixation of life and music “after-the-end.” In response, still brat capitalizes on its predecessor’s obsession with after-chorus modules by reconfiguring them as the bases of remixes alongside new texts that respond to Brat’s impact, social and musical. In other words, it is a large-scale, intertextual “after-the-end” of brat. I end with a comparative formal analysis of “Talk talk” from brat and “Talk talk featuring troye sivan” from still brat that reveals remix as the creative site of formal ambiguity. Treating remix as a formal method, modern day dance music’s insistence on “after-the-end” material and remixing reveals cyclicality that “after-the-end” may become a new beginning. As long as we keep dancing, and looping, and partying, and remixing, we need not consider what to do when the afterparty’s over.