Spencer Kornhaber | The Atlantic

Ye Wants Your Forgiveness. So What?

2026-04-10T07:00:00-04:00

When canceled became a common label applied to basically anyone who’d done anything to offend anyone, it had many unfortunate effects. One was rolling transgressions as serious as sexual assault and as trivial as accidentally not being nice to a fan (maybe) into one bucket of misbehavior. Another was implying that society was run, more than ever, by mob rule. The truth is that the age of consensus has ended, and even the canceled can continue their careers by pitching themselves directly to the public—which is how, for example, the allegedly disgraced Morgan Wallen became the most popular man in country music.

Another consequence was making collective judgment seem cruelly irreversible. Cancel culture, as many a podcaster has ranted over the past decade, offers no obvious path to redemption. Examples of people expressing sincere apologies, changing their behavior, and winning forgiveness have been rare. Transgressors who’ve returned to public life, such as President Trump, have mostly offered denials of wrongdoing and worn their cancellation as a badge of honor.

So when Ye (formerly Kanye West) placed an ad in The Wall Street Journal in January apologizing to “those I’ve hurt,” it was genuinely surprising. A decade ago, after spending years defining the sound of 21st-century hip-hop, Ye began to alienate portions of his listenership by going MAGA. But he remained a bankable celebrity—in a lucrative partnership with Adidas—until 2022, when he went all in on anti-Semitism. He took to shouting out Hitler, selling swastika T-shirts, and otherwise preaching about how Jews control everything and must be stopped. Record labels, brands, and many fans distanced themselves from him.

In the Journal, though, he wrote that this behavior had been the result of an undiagnosed brain injury he’d suffered 25 years earlier. He had “lost touch with reality” but now, armed with a new health routine and outlook on life, had amends to make. “I aspire to earn your forgiveness,” he wrote.

The letter was well written. It conveyed that he’d wrestled with great shame and was humbly offering himself to the world’s mercy. A reader might ask: What if what happened to Ye—mental-health problems giving way to a Third Reich fetish—had happened to me? Wouldn’t I want a chance to make good?

But Ye is not like most people. He’s a celebrity whose words reverberate throughout the culture, and whose reputation is worth a lot of money. In recent weeks, he seemed to be inching his way back into normalcy by releasing an album (Bully) and playing gigs. Then, on Tuesday, the United Kingdom banned him from entry, citing the “public good.” Forgiveness had been the wrong concept to apply to his situation all along. The language of individual morality obscures what so-called cancellations—and ever-elusive uncancellations—really should be about: doing what’s best not for the celebrity but for the rest of us.

The timing of Ye’s apology always seemed a bit convenient. In the same week that the Journal published Ye’s letter, the rapper signed a seven-figure record deal with the media company Gamma. Co-founded by Ye’s former manager Larry Jackson, Gamma is a new music-industry player that’s trying to compete with the major labels. A separate article in the Journal reported that Jackson had discussed Ye’s signing during an all-hands meeting with his staff, some of whom had reservations. The company’s leadership reportedly believed that Ye “was committed to creating music with positive messaging.”

The run-ups to Ye’s albums have traditionally been littered with explosive statements, publicity stunts, and repeated delays. Before his 2024 album Vultures 1, he offered a public apology to Jewish people—then soon doubled down on hating them. By contrast, Bully’s rollout has been serene and slick. Its official release date was pushed back only once, by a week. Ye has given no interviews and posted nothing of note since his January mea culpa.

Until just a few days ago, the low-drama PR strategy seemed to be working. Fans were praising Bully as a heartening return to Ye’s early, soulful sound. Its lyrics contained no inflammatory content. He’d played two sold-out shows at Los Angeles’s SoFi Stadium. Lauryn Hill joined him on stage, and other celebrities were cheering in the audience. Little attention was being paid to the other scandals in his life—such as a lawsuit from his former assistant alleging multiple instances of abuse (he has denied the allegations), which came after previous reports that he’d bullied and harassed employees at Adidas (about which he has not commented).

He was then announced as the headliner for all three days of the Wireless Festival, a long-running and prominent hip-hop event in London. This was the kind of gig that, if it went off without a hitch, would smooth his return to the status of globe-trotting, big-tent pop star.

But not everyone was going along with the rehab plan. After all, less than a year ago Ye was working on openly anti-Semitic music with song titles including “Gas Chambers” and “Heil Hitler.” Creative Community for Peace and other Jewish groups excoriated the Wireless booking, and PepsiCo dropped its sponsorship of the festival.

The managing director of Festival Republic (which, along with Live Nation, runs Wireless), Melvin Benn, released an impassioned defense of the booking. He identified himself as an anti-fascist and a supporter of Jews. He expressed the view that “forgiveness and giving people a second chance are becoming a lost virtue in this ever-increasing divisive world,” and urged people to “offer some forgiveness and hope to him as I have decided to do.” Ye put out a statement saying that his “only goal is to come to London and present a show of change, bringing unity, peace, and love through my music.” He added that he wanted to meet with members of the Jewish community to listen and learn.

[Read: Cling to your disgust]

That same day, the U.K. government denied Ye’s visa, banning him from coming to the country. Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote online that he “will not stop in our fight to confront and defeat the poison of antisemitism. We will always take the action necessary to protect the public and uphold our values.” Wireless subsequently announced that it was canceling the entire festival.

The government intervention quickly redefined the conversation around Ye, bringing up questions of free speech and legal precedent (the U.K. generally has less permissive expression laws than the United States, though both countries have lately wielded immigration policy against artists and activists for things they’ve said). It also, predictably, fed the sense of persecution that Ye’s followers have long clung to. On Reddit and X, some fans are griping that their idol is being subjected to harsher punishments than associates of Jeffrey Epstein have been. They are alluding darkly to a conspiracy … by a certain group of people … who seem to control the world …

In a way, though, the decision by Starmer’s government is clarifying. The question of whether Ye should be “allowed” into public life again—meaning given mainstream platforms and institutional support—was never about whether Ye deserved a comeback. He was shunned not because he’d morally transgressed (though he had) but because he’d used his platform to spread dangerous myths about a group of people already experiencing a rising tide of bigotry. His single “Heil Hitler” (which, again, is recent—released in May 2025) became a rallying song for people such as Nick Fuentes, the ascendant influencer who pushes open racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. In 2022, a hate group hung a banner over a Los Angeles freeway that read Kanye Is Right About the Jews.

Speech laws, of course, vary from country to country. And record companies, corporations, and concert organizers can’t stop anyone from saying whatever they want. But institutions can and probably should try to not give money, megaphones, and credibility to someone who might use those things to spread messages that can get people killed.

Making judgment calls about public harm can be tricky, and the process is muddied by the forgiveness-focused language that rules so much of the conversation about celebrity conduct. Ye’s redemption campaign has foregrounded a theme that fits our parasocial zeitgeist: empathy for the individual. Yet while many of us may want Ye to get better, or believe he’s entitled to personal redemption, none of us has any real idea what’s in his heart. All we have is the record of how he’s acted before, and all we can do is make inferences about how he’s acting now.

My inferences say not to trust him, not yet. After spending decades expressing himself in freewheeling interviews, lately he’s mostly shared his thoughts in highly curated statements. On Bully, he raps in bland and mechanical fashion about conquering darkness and achieving a comeback. His lyrics, once outlandishly specific, are now flagrantly generic: “Know the Lord’s intervention was divine / Political and social tensions on the climb.” Listening, I wondered when the real Ye would crash back in and say what he really thinks, for better or ill. Only time and evidence can make that suspicion wane. And the only reason to rush that process is profit.

The Album That Made Me Fall Back in Love With Heavy Metal

2026-04-02T07:00:00-04:00

One of the ongoing mysteries of my adult life is why I don’t like heavy metal anymore. Back as a young teenager, distorted riffs with shredded vocals were my introduction to serious music fandom. I remember feeling pride when my dad sized me up in a giant black hoodie and wondered when I’d become a “metalhead.” Somewhere along the way, though, my listening turned toward the delicate or the dance-y. I try to stay current with all sorts of genres, but it’s been extremely rare for metal to pierce my skull.

Maybe metal itself has changed: When Tool and Deftones caught my ear in the early 2000s, the genre was a mainstream force. Its musicians seemed to want to conquer the world rather than—as I now perceive whenever I dip in—to burrow in extreme directions for true aficionados. But I suspect that the real reason for my apathy is how I spend my time. One might guess that I grew too soft for noisy aggression, but the truth is that I became too hard, as in jaded. Metal’s irony-free histrionics and fatalism ceased to impress. Life is busy, and negativity comes cheap. I tell myself that all forms of listening are valid, but deep down, I think I’ve developed a wariness of wallowing.

So when I hit “Play” last week on a new metal album drawing critical acclaim, I expected to be screamed at for a few minutes and then turn on something else. Instead … whoa. Full-body chills. A cartoonish dropping of the jaw. I was experiencing the miracle of sudden and unexpected emotion. Distraction, disinterest, numbness: All of these, I was reminded, can be disrupted by the right combination of sounds.

The album is An Undying Love for a Burning World, by Neurosis. Since 1985, the Oakland band has pushed metal in psychedelic directions by employing spacey synthesizers and cosmic lyrics. The band is also heavy. Its guitars evoke appliances crashing off of high surfaces, and its singing is a lot like belching. Over the decades, Neurosis became revered as one of metal’s trustiest guardians—until, in 2019, the band mysteriously parted ways with its longtime vocalist, Scott Kelly. In 2022, the reasons for that departure were made clear when Kelly publicly admitted to “emotional, financial, verbal and physical abuse of my wife and younger children.”

Many fans assumed that the band was done for good. But in secret, it enlisted the journeyman singer-guitarist Aaron Turner and got to recording its first album in 10 years, which was surprise-released in mid-March. The rapturous response that An Undying Love for a Burning World has received indicates that my reaction is not merely the result of naivete: Neurosis has, through some blend of skill and inspiration, made the right kind of noise to stand out in this overwhelming moment.

The opener is a stop-you-in-the-street vocal collage that’s less than a minute long. “We are torn wide open,” shouts the vocalist-guitarist Steve Von Till, sounding far away and very agitated, like he’s calling for help with his leg caught under a boulder. The phrase repeats, and Von Till’s voice seems to come closer. He screams about other things, including “isolation”: a word commonly found in didactic editorials about the spiritual crisis of the smartphone era. But no intellectualized response is needed here. This track is an urgent warning. In sound alone, it grips the gut.

For song two, “Mirror Deep,” the album’s first riff crashes in like an asteroid. It’s a jagged chunk of sound, but it’s accompanied by smooth, smeared elements: a synth drone, clouds of reverb. Turner begins grunting in a choppy cadence that plays counterpoint to the riff. Some heavy metal seeks to make the listener lose themselves in a blur of sound, but Neurosis is playing a different game: Every measure of music is its own drama, with tension and release, expectations fulfilled and subverted. The band wants you up, on, furiously alert.

[Read: The savage empathy of the mosh pit]

It uses that attention to stage moment after moment of sublime intensity. Songs often drop from chaos into quiet passages whose keyboards and strummed guitar glimmer like constellations. And the band does more than play with the live/soft dichotomy; it likes to engineer tricky blends of fast and slow, complex and simple. The astonishing crescendo of “Seething and Scattered” pairs sustained swells of noise with swarms of percussion. The effect is like being pulled from placid water into a rushing undertow. Throughout, a varied palette—industrial sound effects, drum machines, and even some pretty singing—gives the songs a sense of painterly depth.

My first response to the cleverness of this music was giddiness, but as I relistened, a classically metal feeling surfaced: sorrow. The band is prophesying the inevitable death of our species. Many of the lyrics embody the point of view of lifeless particles floating in space, encoded with the sad memory of the civilization they were once a part of. And modern alienation seems to have something to do with that civilization’s end: In “Seething and Scattered,” the band members trade off vocals, singing that “the source of our fall” is our disconnection from “ourselves,” “each other,” and “all that is sacred.”

Disconnection is one of the buzzwords of the 2020s, and none of us really needs another reminder that humanity may be sleepwalking into personal or planetary doom. What we do need is art that can wake us up to the things that humans are uniquely capable of—genius, craft, collaboration. In kicking me back to the mind frame I inhabited decades ago, when all sorts of music felt new, this album reminds me that the time I thought was spent wallowing was really spent doing something else—listening actively, and tapping into a universe larger than the one I existed in day-to-day. Today, tuning out the parts of the world you don’t understand, that you don’t have time for, that you’ve grown away from, is all too easy. Staying open is a struggle, but when it pays off, an entirely different future seems possible.

The Surprising Reason for the New Homophobia

2026-03-27T07:00:00-04:00

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Long ago, the bright-eyed Disney Channel star Shia LaBeouf entered adulthood and set about to become a great man. He studied method acting; he worked with edgy directors; he groaned and screamed like Al Pacino. But those ambitious days are now a distant memory. LaBeouf hasn’t anchored a box-office hit in more than a decade, and little of his 2020s art-house work has drawn buzz. The most notable thing he’s starred in lately was a clip of him on a podcaster’s couch, hunched and diminished, talking about his fear of gay people.

LaBeouf recently spent a night in jail after getting into a series of bar fights in New Orleans. Videos and images of what looked like a belligerent bender spread across the internet, and police reports allege he threw around the word faggot during his arrest. “Big gay people are scary to me,” LaBeouf said, addressing the incident in an interview with the YouTuber Andrew Callaghan that was posted in late February. “When I’m, like, standing by myself and three gay dudes are next to me touching my leg, I get scared.” Callaghan asked for details, and LaBeouf physically crumpled, trying to stop himself from saying more. But soon he brought up gay people again, then again. He summed up his feelings by paraphrasing what the Bible says about homosexuality: “Nah.”

Amid whatever wave of the anti-woke backlash we’re living through, I’m aware that it’s a bit boring to object, as a gay person, to offensive things said by celebrities. And offended isn’t really what I felt watching LaBeouf speak. Pity, sure: He’s been arrested many times before, and he doesn’t seem to be doing great, all in all (police took him back into custody on an additional battery charge related to his original February 17 arrest shortly after his interview, and he hasn’t yet entered a plea in the case). What really caught my attention—and this may sound catty, but it’s relevant—was how LaBeouf looked and acted. He sported a tight fade and tugged at his teensy shorts. He was sharing his feelings. As he mumbled about the menace of homosexuals, he was, to my eyes, behaving in ways that would have gotten many gay guys his age bullied in high school.

Mostly, though, his interview communicated a sense of muffled, oncoming alarm. Americans are burned-out, frustrated, and hunting for scapegoats. And here was another sign of gathering resentment toward queer people—of a new wave of homophobia rooted, in part, in the strange state of straight men.

Homophobia of course never went away, but not long ago, it seemed like it might. Implicit and explicit bias against gay people fell steadily from 2007 to 2020 and was on track to soon hit zero (!), according to a 2022 study by the psychologists Tessa E. S. Charlesworth and Mahzarin R. Banaji. This accorded with the ambient feeling of late-2010s culture, when Lil Nas X was the pink-hatted prince of pop and Budweiser was striping its cans in rainbow colors without fear of a bullet from Kid Rock.

But something changed in the early 2020s. Pollsters began noting diminishing approval for LGBTQ legal protections. As trans issues became inescapable in polarized national politics, explicit anti-trans bias spiked 16 percent from 2021 to 2024, according to Charlesworth, Banaji, and the researcher Meriel Doyle. Less intuitively, the trend line of long-declining homophobia reversed, resulting in a 10-point jump for explicit anti-gay bias over that same period.

The past few months in politics have made this turn obvious. Prominent right-wing voices who justified the killing of the protester Renee Good described her as a “lesbian agitator” and a “rug munching leftist,” as though her sexuality might have any bearing on whether she deserved to die. The White House advertised car deregulation with a video that mocked two blue-haired, queer-seeming people pathetically stalled in a Prius. Commentators have taken to treating gay and its synonyms as an insult. Conservative groups launched a campaign to roll back marriage rights, with the name “Greater Than”—as in, the well-being of kids (allegedly endangered by gay parents) is more important than equality.

In the wilds of digital culture, gay panic roams in more anarchic forms. Reels and TikTok teem with jokes about Jeffrey Epstein, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and a feminized version of Charlie Kirk preying on boys—though Epstein serially exploited girls and Kirk was a straight, married conservative whom no one has accused of abuse. Nicki Minaj, that longtime queer icon turned MAGA trophy, has taken to dissing “cocksuckas” like Don Lemon. Millions of views accumulated for a kid rapping about the demonic nature of LGBTQ people. Zesty became Zoomer-speak for “fruity” or “swishy” a few years back. And in livestreams and chat rooms, the old-school slurs seem as hot as ever.

This wave is one symptom of a broader cultural regression. During the 2020s, measures of intra-group prejudices of all sorts—racism, sexism, ageism—have been rising, according to a New York Times article about the return of homophobia by Charlesworth and her Northwestern colleague Eli J. Finkel. Trans folks, long the subject of sustained conservative criticism, continue losing not only public acceptance but legal rights; Kansas, for example, just revoked driver’s licenses for people whose listed gender doesn’t match what they were assigned at birth.

But although transphobia overlaps with homophobia, Charlesworth and Finkel argue that trans backlash is not the primary reason for rising anti-gay sentiment. Instead, they suggest that one factor explains the rise in all kinds of identity-based biases: the same blend of economic anxiety and anti-establishment sentiment that’s driving so much of American politics. They write, “Gay and lesbian people, newly woven into the fabric of mainstream society, may have been collateral damage in a broader revolt against a system that felt broken.”

The irony is that a minority once viewed as filled with sissies and losers is now portrayed as filled with bullies and power brokers, and straight people, especially men, seem to perceive themselves as the weak and afraid ones. This inversion explains a host of baffling political and cultural phenomena of late. It also shows that some of the most durable stereotypes about gay people were never really about sexuality—which might explain why the homophobes, more and more, seem to fit those stereotypes.

Over the past few months, the young and male-dominated online subculture of “looks-maxxing” has blown up into a mainstream-media cycle, causing old-school outlets (including The Atlantic and, last weekend, SNL) to investigate new terms such as bonesmashing and foid (don’t ask). The phenomenon is hard to talk about, because the extent to which it’s real or trolling isn’t clear. What’s undeniable is that influencers with male audiences are perceiving an upside to acting a bit like they’re getting ready for a trip to Fire Island.

Looks-maxxing is an ethos of self-improvement taken to an extreme, and its more explicit inspirations are the pickup artists of early-2000s infamy and the incels of 2010s 4Chan. The idea is that in a society that has allegedly become hostile to men—male privilege coded as toxic masculinity, and so on—the only way for boys to gain an edge is to be handsome. Methods for maximizing looks range from workouts and skin-care routines to more radical options, such as chewing hard gum for hours to get a squarer jaw.

The poster child for this world is a waifish, wavy-haired 20-year-old who goes by the name Clavicular. He says he started taking testosterone at age 14 and that he does crystal meth to attain hollow cheeks. He’s one of the most popular streamers on Kick, where he films his life for hours a day. He recently inspired profiles in The New York Times and GQ, and walked in a star-studded runway show during New York Fashion Week. He’s also a frequent user of sexist, homophobic, and racist slurs—usually delivered in a tone of icy boredom—and is pals with the Hitler fan Nick Fuentes and the professional misogynist Andrew Tate.

The ostensible point of looks-maxxing is to bag hot chicks, but quite clearly the real fun comes from inspiring awe in men. To the Times, Clavicular described sex with women as mostly a waste of time—something that “is going to gain me nothing.” What he really wants to do is “mog,” meaning attain status over other dudes (mog is short for AMOG or “Alpha Male of the Group”). He’s considering getting double-jaw-replacement surgery in order to look like the guy who (according to his pseudoscientific calculations) has the the most handsome face on earth: Matt Bomer, a gay actor frequently featured in work by Ryan Murphy, TV’s king of queer dramedy.

As many social-media users have suggested, all of this seems a bit, well ... y’know. Clavicular is like a blend of Dorian Gray and Patrick Bateman, those fictional creations of gay authors out to probe the sinister side of male vanity. And looks-maxxing culture evokes stereotypes about the masculinity-obsessed segments of the gay world that traffic in steroids, plastic surgery, and illegal stimulants. It also calls back to more deeply rooted patterns in queer culture—a certain fascination with aesthetics and self-mastery.

Queer writing and art have long probed the source of those fascinations. The psychologist Alan Downs’s The Velvet Rage deconstructed the “best little boy in the world” syndrome that makes many gay guys into overachievers. Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” crystallized a way of seeing the world as full of artifice, which can lead queer people to behave in a self-conscious, knowingly false manner. Oscar-winning movies such as Moonlight and Brokeback Mountain depicted gay men disguising their gendered shame in traditionally manly trappings. The theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick examined the extent to which jealous imitation drives all manner of same-sex relations, straight and gay.

But any good explanation of how queer personalities are formed begins with the acknowledgment of how powerful marginalization can be. Gay people realize, at some early age, that the world isn’t made for people like them. And for men, raised with the social pressure to seek dominance, that realization can lead to an obsession with climbing the rungs—whether in the context of sex, money, or something else. All of which is to say: Gay men are the original incels. They are born into heightened status anxiety and must maneuver to get ahead. And one way to do that is to be hot.

[Read: What was Clavicular?]

The looks-maxxers have stumbled into a similar set of psychological conditions by dint of socioeconomic circumstances and social media. The 21st century’s obstacles for young men—as seen in deaths of despair and lagging employment—have been amply publicized both by credible journalists and by charlatans such as Fuentes. Clearly, many boys are struggling with a sense of futility. In one stream, Clavicular explained that he felt “we live in one of the worst societies ever throughout the entire history of the world.” What he meant, he went on to say, is that a woman will barely look at a man unless he’s high status.

Looks-maxxing has been described as a nihilistic rejection of society’s values. Really it’s darkly aspirational and deeply credulous of the ideals it perceives society to hold. Is it not intuitive to believe that the face card is the primary currency of the social-media age? Women and girls are becoming only more fixated on their beauty. But they’ve faced the pressure of being pretty for generations. They are socialized in a world of makeup tutorials, fashion magazines, and objectifying advertisements—not to mention feminist commentary and pop songs about rejecting or healthily navigating image standards.

Straight men are just catching up, vanity-wise, and political opportunists have eagerly fed into their insecurities. Fuentes, a self-declared proud virgin at age 27, recently urged his followers to spend all their energy trying to “ascend,” the looks-maxxing term for becoming your best self. Tate has said that any man who has sex with women for pleasure is “gay” because they should be focused on procreation. Men like these preach that various historically marginalized groups—gays, Jews, Blacks, women—are to blame for the cultural conditions their viewers chafe at. Self-improvement, in this view, isn’t pursued to, well, improve the self. It’s to win a competition.

Clavicular insists he’s not a political person and doesn’t actually hate queer people (despite using terms such as tranny and faggot). But his outlook nearly necessitates bigotry: If you’re doing so many things that are stereotypically gay, mostly for the approval of other men, panicked expressions of “no homo” become a reflex. Yet the link between looks-maxxing and rising anti-gay sentiment is probably even simpler than that. Straight men feel they’ve fallen in the social hierarchy. And when they look up, who do they see?

One answer is emblazoned on the February cover of Wired: an image of two men standing hip to hip, shaking hands that shoot out of unzipped pants where another appendage should be. Text reads MEMBERS ONLY and INSIDE THE GAY TECH MAFIA. The backdrop is hazmat yellow, and in a touch that’s as subtle as a propaganda poster, one wrist sports a smartwatch displaying the rainbow flag.

The article inside is a strained and mincing document filled with speculation that gay-male social life is entangled with the power structure of Silicon Valley. Anonymous sources express suspicion that gay guys are getting opportunities that straight ones are not. The writer, Zoë Bernard, tries and fails to be invited to any sexy parties at which Peter Thiel or Sam Altman might be in attendance. Midway through, the article acknowledges that “between 2000 and 2022, the years for which data is available, only 0.5 percent of startup venture funding went to LGBTQ+ founders.” But within the tech world—one of the few remaining beacons for American dream–style ambition, especially for young men—the myth of queer power clearly holds sway.

The factual basis for broader perceptions of gay prosperity is mixed. Cis queer people are outpacing straight people by some general measures, including marriage happiness and male educational attainment. And widely publicized 2017 research led by the Vanderbilt economist Kitt Carpenter reported that gay American men were, for the first time, earning higher incomes than straight men—about 10 percent more. This observation added to a longer body of research showing that lesbians tend to earn more than straight women with similar backgrounds.

But a 2025 paper co-authored by Carpenter complicated those findings, spotlighting “consistent evidence that gay men, lesbian women, bisexual men, and bisexual women are all in significantly worse overall financial health than comparable heterosexual people.” The Human Rights Campaign issued a report based on 2021 data that showed LGBTQ people lagging in wages, making 90 cents on the dollar compared with the median national wage (trans women make the least: 60 cents on the dollar).

In any case, the young generation that’s now transforming American politics grew up at a time when pop culture made LGBTQ people into aspirational figures. Netflix’s 2018 Queer Eye reboot saw queer men giving normies makeovers that in many cases amounted to a monetary infusion in the form of a home renovation or a nice haircut. In the same decade, pop stars such as Miley Cyrus and Sam Smith embraced queer identity, the millionaire Caitlyn Jenner became the most famous trans person in the country, and Pete Buttigieg emerged as the first viable presidential candidate to be openly gay. To many adults who’d grown up in a world in which LGBTQ people were stigmatized and sidelined, this visibility felt groundbreaking. To many of the kids who were just coming online then, gay acceptance was simply a mainstream norm—and queer people were affiliated with success.

In the conspiracy-minded 2020s, that success is more widely feared than admired or understood. Anti-establishment sentiment helped elect Donald Trump, and it’s now helping drive the polling swing against him amid the Epstein files’ damning revelations. Clavicular’s quick rise has caused social-media users to speculate that he’s funded by Thiel, the implication of which is that he’s a closeted servant of a gay billionaire. (Clavicular rejects that theory and says that streaming makes him more than $100,000 a month.) Diddy is serving a sentence for transporting women for prostitution, but many in the public seem to think that he and other celebrities ritualistically abused Justin Bieber and other young men (a notion that never even came up in Diddy’s trial and that was denied by Bieber, whose spokesperson condemned efforts to shift focus away from the true victims).

This conflation of anti-establishment angst and homophobic paranoia didn’t arise organically. After Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, conservative activists looking to rebuild an electoral majority stoked conspiracy theories about queer people’s newfound cultural visibility. Efforts such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law and the various protests against drag-queen story hour pushed back against an alleged liberal plot to “groom” or “indoctrinate” kids. And the censorious and controlling nature of those efforts offers a reminder of another comparison for the vanity of the new homophobes: fascism. A fascination with appearance, self-mastery, and masculinity has also long been the provenance of authoritarian regimes—including ones that brutalized gays, Jews, and immigrants. Mass status anxiety, history has shown time and again, can be exploited for the most dangerous kind of politics.

Yet maybe, as the cartoonish machismo of Trumpism proves its hollowness, America’s latent resentment can be channeled to better ends. And maybe queer people can show how. After all, the gay archetype encompasses more than just stereotypical titans of industry and hunky Adonises; it includes so many of society’s pivotal artists and writers and thinkers. Alienation doesn’t only spur people to conquer the system that alienated them. It can instead provoke a quest to creatively redefine success on one’s own terms.

Maybe that’s an idea we can pass along too. Watching the recent interview with LaBeouf, it’s pathetically obvious that even he doesn’t really believe that gay people are the source of his struggles. He halts and backtracks and winces; he acknowledges that his “small-man complex” causes him to lash out in stupid ways. As for Clavicular, one of his signature neologisms is jester-maxxing: the idea of trying to win over a girl by being funny rather than being hot. No one wants to be a jester, debasing oneself for a more powerful person’s amusement. What’s left unexplored is another option: Stop performing for others, ask yourself who you really are, and go from there.

The Midlife Crisis Comes for Millennial Pop

2026-03-11T07:00:00-04:00

Once upon the ’90s, a teenage girl named Robin Miriam Carlsson was crowned a pop princess. Her crystalline voice and secretive smile caught the attention of the Swedish record industry, whose producers and songwriters helped her create the swooning global hits “Show Me Love” and “Do You Know (What It Takes).” But Carlsson, first discovered at age 13, realized she didn’t want to be a singing automaton, a mere vessel for the pop machine. She turned down a deal from the U.S. branch of Jive Records, which then set out to find an American version of her—and landed on Britney Spears.

By then, Robin Carlsson had become Robyn. A few years later, in 2005, she founded her own label to make her own kind of music. Her new sound combined firm dance beats, campy hip-hop flourishes, and synth riffs that spiraled and tessellated like the instruments in a Bach fugue. Her lyrics declared independence from clingy lovers and assorted social expectations, often through analogies inspired by technology. To simply quote her song titles from 2010’s Body Talk, a now-classic album, she was an “Indestructible” “Fembot” warning, “Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do.” Beneath the metallic veneer, though, her songs had the tenderness and precision of a homily. The effect was to make solitude sound sexy, sad, and hopeful at once.

The timing had been right for her to liberate herself. The traditional music business was collapsing, as the internet cut into CD sales while letting listeners elevate their own niche idols. Mainstream pop was going maximalist by overloading its production with digital whizbangery; indie rock had risen as a rawer alternative. Robyn split the difference. She expressed a rebellious worldview in a sleek and organized way, like a manifesto in a well-formatted Word doc.

That manifesto was one that 21st-century pop culture wanted to hear. Spears had become a cautionary tale: The girl who gave her youth to the record industry ended up losing her legal sovereignty (via the establishment of a conservatorship in 2008 that remained intact until 2021). Robyn did not become nearly as famous, but her emo bangers pointed the way for the likes of Lorde, Ariana Grande, and even Taylor Swift once she started playing with keyboards. Poptimism, the ascendant belief that a genre ruled by formulas and artifice can contain plenty of originality and humanity, made Robyn its mascot. And with time, her outlook on music came to seem like an insight into life itself.

Or at least, that’s how many Millennials felt. Though Robyn is Gen X, she captivated my generation of idealists, who were out to upgrade the world that our parents had built and express ourselves in the process. Young adults in the early earbuds age used her songs as fuel for runs, laptop work, Tinder hookups, and the solitary, self-reflective mornings after. We also bopped along to her with our friends. HBO’s Girls cemented her status in a legendary scene: Hannah Horvath carefully drafts a killer tweet in her bedroom, then starts jumping around to Robyn’s defining single, “Dancing on My Own.” Her roommate, back from her yuppie adventuring, walks in and joins the party.

The assurance of being yourself and being liked, fulfilling your purpose while climbing life’s rungs, has obvious appeal in youth, before compromises and obligations start to pile too high. But Robyn is now 46 and back with her first album in eight years. She is somehow singing the same song—even if the fable it spins seems more fantastical than ever.

Many pop stars mellow into stately eminence in middle age, as Madonna (temporarily) did in her late 30s with 1998’s Ray of Light. Robyn appeared to be trending that way with her last album, 2018’s Honey—a dreamy beatscape that signaled appreciation for the mid-range of life after chasing many highs. Anthemic action was giving way to chill mantras, as if to regulate the ever noisier, ever more distracting world.

Robyn performs “Sexistential” on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in January.
(Scott Kowalchyk / CBS)

But Sexistential, released in March, pushes in the opposite direction, toward starry-eyed excess and abandon. The cover art shows Robyn screaming and topless. The title track features her rapping the word boner. Echoes of earnest 2000s indie pop, including from Robyn’s own catalog, abound. When she humped the air during a performance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in January, much of the internet snickered: Had the coolest girl in pop finally become cringe?

[Read: Robyn’s Honey: The thrill is gone, and that’s okay]

Perhaps so—cringe appears to be the fate of anyone older than 25 in the TikTok age. And pop culture has rarely allowed its female stars to grow older without mockery. But Sexistential may discomfit listeners for reasons other than ageism. After Honey, Robyn broke up with her on-and-off partner of more than a decade and then had a son through IVF. To judge by the disorienting sound of this album, middle-aged motherhood for her has been less an experience of setting down roots than of ripping them up. The title song sets her pregnancy saga—scrolling through dating apps amid doctor visits and hormonal spikes—to fast-paced club music while filtering her voice for cartoonish effect. “Blow My Mind” is a cover of her own song from 24 years ago, but this version rewrites lyrics about romantic infatuation into ones about finding your baby to be ridiculously cute. On the final track, “Into the Sun,” distorted bass roars like a rocket engine—evoking her many previous sci-fi references—as Robyn propels herself into the unknown: “Look what I’ve done / So brave and dumb.”

The music amplifies both her giddiness and her uncertainty. Sexistential ’s production judders and glitches in ways that call to mind ’80s synth experimentalists such as Art of Noise and the rowdy sample collaging of the Beastie Boys in the ’90s. Its messiness is also in step with 2020s hyperpop—scruffy, topsy-turvy electronic music that seeks to harness, not counteract, modern overstimulation. The wooziest moments sacrifice Robyn’s easy-listening appeal for the sake of surprise. On the album opener, “Really Real,” a shattered-glass sound effect rings out before she sings, “We’re splitting up reality / And I slip out through the crack in between it.”

What makes this chaos delightful rather than annoying is Robyn’s unshakable sense of control, grounded in pop principles and thoughtful craft. Sexistential ’s many catchy melodies bounce atop bright, blocky synth lines. Its psychedelic interludes exist to snap back into satisfying rhythms. Its lyrics brim with depersonalized language (“This is where the shared experience ends”), self-help real talk (“Fuck a therapist, it’s not mental / I need philosophy, this shit is existential”), and biological determinism (as in the lead single, “Dopamine”). She’s mapping out the way that even life’s strangest chapters unfold logically.

The album, Robyn has said, was partly inspired by hearing André 3000, of the hip-hop duo Outkast, explain that he’d pivoted to instrumental music because no one wants to hear a 48-year-old man rap about his colonoscopy. In Robyn’s view, the unglamorous milestones of middle age are plenty deserving of pop treatment. Two years ago, a 33-year-old Charli XCX dominated pop culture with a similarly unruly album called Brat. It dwelled on the question of whether Charli would ever give up her hard-partying ways and settle down with kids. Robyn is now arguing that the choice is a false one.

That argument is certainly upbeat in its implications—but the sound of Sexistential suggests the limits of maturing hedonistically. As I’ve been playing the album on repeat, savoring its intricate details and humming its candied choruses, I’ve felt a little self-conscious: Sexistential ’s childlike glee raises the specter that Robyn and her listeners still have some growing up to do.

But I’ve also felt grateful for how playfully she’s engaging with midlife vertigo. The generation that grew up listening to Robyn is full of people whose blend of careerism and individualism has made them delay or skip marriage and children. Have we compromised too much, or not enough? Is there time for a reset? These sorts of questions are timeless rites of passage at the end of youth. Barreling ahead, Robyn is yet again modeling how to find meaning in the conventional—by doing it our own way.

This article appears in the April 2026 print edition with the headline “Robyn Is Still Dancing On Her Own.”

The Sickening Fairy Tale of Yasmin Hanani

2026-03-02T07:00:00-05:00

This post contains spoilers through Season 4, Episode 8 of Industry.

Over four seasons of HBO’s drama Industry, Yasmin Kara-Hanani has emerged as TV’s most lovable monster. The show portrays devious, cocaine-huffing young bankers climbing the ranks of global finance, and Yasmin—or Yas, for short—has cut the least noble path of all. The posh, multilingual daughter of a media magnate, she fails upward time and again by drawing upon her privilege rather than her competence. She’s sadistic in sex and in her friendships. Plus, she provoked her dad to jump off a boat, then let him drown.

And yet there’s something about Yas that makes her more than just fun to hate. The actor Marisa Abela plays her in a binary state of panic and swagger by sobbing like a dejected child or slyly grinning like one who’s about to wolf down an ice-cream cake. Whereas other characters are cold and sharklike, Yas feels her way through the world—and uses her vulnerability to manipulate others. Being born into wealth taught her that none of us is in command of our fate, so we had better cheat for whatever control we can. She’s the statuesque girlboss for the new gilded age, and though I hate to say it, I’ve been rooting for her.

I really hate to say it now that Industry’s fourth season finale has aired, because the last twist in this proudly convoluted show is that Yasmin transforms into a sex trafficker reminiscent of Ghislaine Maxwell. What’s really sick is how much sense the outcome makes. At a time when real-life conspiracy theories appear truer every day, Industry lays out the market logic underpinning the coordinated exploitation by elites that no longer seems like the kind of thing that happens only on TV shows.

Industry has been topical since its 2020 premiere. Early seasons were set at a London megabank that had—post-financial crisis, post-#MeToo, post-racial-reckoning—allegedly reformed its work culture. But despite all the HR-speak about inclusion and ethics, the competitive atmosphere remained as brutal as a gladiator pit. Season 3 saw the bank make a big bet on green investing—until it was acquired by a petrostate’s wealth fund that, in the finale, closed the trading floor where the show’s action had taken place. The characters exit their skyscraper office for new environs: a hedge fund, a fintech corporation, a golf-heavy retirement, and in Yas’s case, the socialite life as the new wife of a baronet.

With this reinvention, the show morphed from a workplace drama into something more like a magisterial airport novel. Season 4 roams from theme to theme—porn, privacy, fraud, techno-fascism, espionage, and, yes, sex crimes. The dialogue is overwrought, the plot contrivances are gratuitous, and the show has never been more fun. Watching has been like sitting in the passenger seat of a speeding sports car driven by someone who won’t stop talking about what they read in, say, The Atlantic, yet is charismatic enough not to bore.

A consistent theme underlies the chaotic story: At the highest levels, every crime is connected. Yas maneuvers her old-money husband, Henry Muck (played by Kit Harington), into becoming the CEO of Tender, a former payments processor for porn and gambling sites that rebranded as a respectable bank. Tender’s co-founder Whitney Halberstram (Max Minghella) had used creative accounting to cover up the fact that the company is a front for—dun dun dun—Russian intelligence. Harper Stern, Industry’s biz-wiz protagonist, exposes his fraud and makes a ton of money in the process. In the finale, Muck takes the fall for Tender while the true villains get away. And Yas, having studied the methods of those villains, divorces him to set about ushering young—possibly underage—escorts to the men who would run the world.

Yas’s fate has long been foreshadowed in her relationship with her dad, Charles Hanani (Adam Levy), a publishing baron and a sex pest who likely molested Yas when she was young. In adulthood, her contempt for him smolders while he pays her bills and uses his clout to secure her employment. In Season 3, their toxic dynamic turned fatal during an argument on his yacht, the Lady Yasmin. (Charles, drunk and belligerent, jumps overboard while the boat is still in motion, and Yas simply watches as he is left behind—then fails to alert anyone of what has happened. His waterlogged corpse is found weeks later.)

In retrospect, the parallels between Yas and Maxwell—who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence after a 2021 conviction for child sex trafficking and other charges—are glaring. Maxwell’s father, Robert, was a newspaper mogul with a mean streak who, Maxwell has said, physically abused her as a kid. Robert’s yacht was named the Lady Ghislaine. In 1991, he fell off it and drowned under mysterious circumstances, although Ghislaine was not present. Around that time, his daughter met and began dating Jeffrey Epstein.

Observers of the Epstein case (including her own lawyer) have speculated that Maxwell’s childhood explains why she was willing to participate in exploitation. In Industry, Yas’s inner workings hardly seem complicated. Her habit of cruelty is clearly an example of someone paying forward their psychic damage; dialogue has repeatedly riffed upon the idea that hurt people hurt people. After her boss bullies her in Season 1, she bullies her own underling in Season 2. When that underling reports sexual harassment by a client, Yas doesn’t affirm or comfort—she minimizes the incident, saying, “We’ve all been there.”

But with her latest turn, Industry has made a point to move past a purely psychological read of abuse. Really, Yas’s story is a twisted fable about surviving and thriving in patriarchal capitalism. After her dad—who had been embezzling from his company—dies, she inherits his debts and is tarred in the media for appearing to benefit from his crimes. The scandal results in her firing, and she is made to stare down a possible descent from riches to rags. Similar to how Maxwell faced the consequences of her late father’s financial dealings—after Robert’s death, $565 million was discovered to be missing from his business’s pension fund—Yas finds security in the arms of a rich guy.

But Muck is no Epstein, malevolent and cunning. He’s a failson with terrible addiction and mental-health issues who helped drive a company into the ground last season, and loses an election for Parliament this season. Throughout Season 4, Yas tries to stabilize him by making him feel like a man—including by inviting his assistant, Hayley (Kiernan Shipka), into a threesome. Hayley turns out to be a call girl Halberstram had hired to woo and blackmail powerful figures. Yas realizes that she may have been the target of an extortion scheme—but instead of distancing herself, she pulls Hayley closer and treats her like a protégé.

The reason for that strange behavior is finally made clear in the finale. Viewers find Yas in a meeting between a newspaper owner (her former uncle-in-law, for whom she seems to be working) and a politician named Sebastian Stefanowicz (Edward Holcroft). Stefanowicz is a rising right-wing star in the United Kingdom, and he considers Peter Thiel a close friend. “High modernity is bust,” he says when asked about his worldview. “We need clarity. We need efficient, post-partisan governance to help our communities.”

Ambition glimmers in Yas’s eyes as Stefanowicz delivers this pitch that tidily echoes Curtis Yarvin–style authoritarianism. She offers to help “polish” his image, and plans a dinner in Paris to raise donations on his behalf. Their guests include “titans of industry, academics, evolutionary biologists,” as summarized by one attendee, an Austrian nobleman whose chateau is decorated with a painting by Adolf Hitler (as seen in a previous episode). Yas also brings Hayley and her sex-worker associates, including a girl named Dolly, who’s referred to as Hayley’s “little cousin.” Her passport—which may or may not be authentic—lists her as being born in 2011.

Harper has been invited to the dinner too because Yas thinks she could be a financial adviser to Stefanowicz. But after taking in the scene, Harper is horrified. She confronts Yas about the extreme viewpoints expressed around the table and all the young women “draped” on the men after dinner. Yas deflects her concerns as naivete. “I lost my virginity when I was 14, okay?” Yas says. Her rationalization continues: “The world is not exploitation or opportunity. It’s both/and.”

[Read: Your individuality doesn’t matter. Industry knows why.]

The show understands the gravity of this moment. Yas is not stumbling into evil unwittingly or being forced by circumstance. She’s making a choice. Harper looks Yas in the eyes and tells her, “That is not your voice coming out of your mouth.” She demands that her friend take her hand and leave the party. Yas stays put.

As shocking as it is for a series to turn one of its principals into a predator, this development has the feel of a puzzle coming together. Over the course of the show, Yas has searched and searched for ways to prove her worth. Here it is: a market role she’s uniquely qualified to fill. The elites need a madam. A demand exists for underage sex. And fulfilling demand feels good: Yas tells Harper that her new role brings her “joy” and makes her experience “less pain.”

This entire season has dissected the way that modern society conflates existential and economic purpose. Characters experience professional loss as mortal danger: A journalist is fired and then dies of a drug overdose; a stock trader who’d become a pariah throws himself off a balcony; Muck’s professional failures lead to a suicide attempt. The fear of uselessness explains why the banker Eric Tao (Ken Leung) leaves a cushy retirement to get back to finance, even at the cost of neglecting his kids. At a time when AI is threatening to wipe out sectors of the economy, Industry is making a dark point about the value of work and the lengths to which people will go to fill a void of meaning and money.

It’s also landing a hideously trenchant critique of the elite. The publicly released Epstein files have not proved that Maxwell helped traffic girls as part of a blackmail scheme—but they have shown how the powerful think. Epstein’s emails are laden with the same race science that Stefanowicz’s supporters use to justify the dehumanization of people they already feel superior to. Writing to Thiel, Epstein cheered Brexit for helping usher in chaos and tribalism from which they could profit. He wrote something that Industry’s most rapacious short sellers might say: “Finding things on their way to collapse , was much easier than finding the next bargain.”

Yas was on her way to collapse, and now she’s doing the unthinkable. As I watched, my brain rebelled at her transformation; it seemed so salacious, so over-the-top. But then the logic of this finale settled in my gut. Yas is no longer a sympathetic character, but she’s disturbingly understandable. She, like so many others, has bought into the view that we are all but predators and prey.

Slow Down, Charli XCX

2026-02-24T09:00:00-05:00

The most influential media format of the 21st century probably isn’t the podcast, or the TikTok video, or the video game. It’s the mood board. Long used by graphic designers and ad execs, mood boards are collages of images and words—magazine clippings, movie stills, headlines—that guide how a project is supposed to feel. Over the course of the internet era, platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest have encouraged everyday people to mood-board their life, and creative-director jargon—curate, worlds—has gone mainstream. Trendspotters now hunt for the next “rare aesthetic,” which is Gen Z slang for any combination of images and sounds that makes the brain sizzle in a cool (usually nostalgic) way.

Mood-boardism carries a certain set of assumptions about creativity. It suggests that powerful effects can arise from decontextualized parts, as if casting a spell from snips and snails and puppy-dog tails. Various higher objectives of art and media—discover new ideas, crystallize difficult truth, tell meaningful stories—tend to come second to vibes. Some creative professionals have started dissing mood boards as feeding our supposed crisis of cultural stagnation. But the technique is now automated by AI, which ingests prompts and recombines preexisting media to spit out content.

For now, the leader of mood-board chic is a human being, and a quite likable one: the 33-year-old British dance-pop singer Charli XCX, though to call her a dance-pop singer is to focus on just part of her persona. For as many people who know her for songs such as “Boys” and “Von Dutch,” equally as many others recognize her aesthetic traits: fried black hair, chalky nocturnal complexion, cigarettes, auto-tune, and the piercing green hue of her 2024 album, Brat. She’s the kind of person who is praised with the term je ne sais quoi, even though fans can list exactly what makes Charli Charli. And over the years, she’s made the case that mood-boardism can, in fact, drive innovation—though her latest projects, the film The Moment and the soundtrack for Wuthering Heights, show why it usually doesn’t.

Charli earned cult acclaim throughout the 2010s by blending archetypes cunningly: She was part Britney Spears, part Siouxsie Sioux, part guerilla-marketing exec. She sang stuttering hooks in a worldly rasp over beats by idiosyncratic producers; she did fascinating things online, such as livestreaming the creation of a new album during the early pandemic. Brat was conceived title-first, before a note of music was written. When the album pushed her, at last, into mainstream recognition, she could brag that she was already an icon to the tastemaker class. “I’m your favorite reference, baby,” she rapped on the opening track, “360.”

But what fans really loved about Brat, and have always loved about Charli, is the way her taste is backed by craft. Her production spiced up 2000s rave-pop with hints of chipper children’s music in an oh-so-brain-sizzling way. She wrote Brat’s lyrics in the style of text messages to her friends, and although some of the results were a bit crude, the overall effect was to x-ray her self-doubting, irrepressibly romantic psyche. When she invited a cast of contemporary musicians to remix the album, it pushed the Brat era—if not the original album per se—into transcendence. She projected herself as queen of a coked-up dance party, but the point wasn’t just hedonism. Listening felt like being pulled into side chats with lots of different characters who were at precisely the right level of intoxication to reveal something interesting to you—crushes, anxieties, rivalries. This was fresh, extroverted pop that managed to capture something true and complex about social life.

To hear Charli tell it, the point of Brat was to make a shade of green hot. In a viral interview clip from shortly before the album’s release, she opined that “music is not important” and that the task of the modern artist is to create a “world”—to project a vision across a variety of media, basically. This was hardly a radical statement in an era of cinematic universes, nor did it necessarily break with the approach of, say, David Bowie or Beyoncé. But the statement had an air of accelerationism, positing an upside to the systematic sidelining of music in the modern attention wars. After all, if we redefine marketing as art, then we’re definitely not in an artistic doldrum. Still, hearing “Music is not important” from one of music’s most promising voices was … concerning. I hoped she was being a bit cheeky.

Alas. Following Brat, she’s working to extend the Charli XCX experience into a new medium for her: film. She is an actor in at least seven different movies that have recently come out or will soon. The flagship of that crop is The Moment, a self-produced mockumentary about the Brat era. She has also recorded the soundtrack for Emerald Fennell’s eye-popping, ticket-selling take on Wuthering Heights. These efforts extend her brand by combining influences in savvy ways. They also show what a hollow goal that is.

In The Moment, Charli plays a version of herself from recent history: late summer 2024, when Brat was blasting out at parties, inspiring TikTok dance trends, and becoming appropriated by a presidential campaign. Keenly aware of the short shelf life for trends in the digital age, and that the big break she has spent her career seeking has finally arrived, movie-Charli works to keep Bratmentum going for as long as possible. “The second people are getting sick of you,” the influencer Kylie Jenner counsels her in one scene, “that’s when you have to go even harder.”

Going harder, in this case, means cutting deals. The real-world Charli has endorsed an array of products including eyeshadow and prebiotic sodas; the film version pushes that tendency just over the line of parody by having her endorse a Brat-colored credit card aimed at young LGBTQ consumers. She also devises a concert documentary that will be released by Amazon. Although she initially wants to make that film with her longtime creative director, Celeste (played by Hailey Gates), her label insists on a hack director named Johannes (Alexander Skarsgård, a doofy highlight of the film).

What ensues is a clash of mood boards. Celeste’s version of the tour is harshly minimalistic, all black-and-white strobe lights and profane on-screen text. (This is the version that Charli actually staged; I recall questioning my own eyes when I saw her perform last spring, because she’d managed to make herself look like a hologram.) Johannes warns that such a vision will alienate families who want to stream the concert at home. He pushes a colorful girl-power pep rally complete with corny props and inspirational speeches. He tries, in other words, to make Charli XCX more like Taylor Swift.

Plenty of listeners already think of Charli and Swift as the yin and yang of contemporary pop, representing different ideals: chaos versus order, subculture versus stadium, Dionysus versus Apollo. And the two women have fed that comparison with their music. A Brat song was widely interpreted as expressing self-loathing inadequacy in the shadow of Swift’s success. A song on Swift’s 2025 album, The Life of a Showgirl, was, in turn, widely interpreted as a Charli smackdown: “I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave,” Swift sang. Maybe what she’d really heard were rumblings that The Moment was going to hold up Swift’s aesthetics—which, to be fair, are also a lot like Katy Perry’s or Disneyland’s—as the height of tacky.

[Read: Taylor Swift’s fairy tale is over]

All of which is to say that The Moment has rich material to mine. It suggests that the arch commercialism practiced by the real-life Charli is not the same as trading integrity for success. And it makes a fascinating point about what really sets Charli apart from her more earnest contemporaries. Charli and Celeste want the Brat tour to feel like a nightclub, but Johannes says, “A nightclub is not a story. A nightclub is a nightclub, and at some point, the night has to end.” Charli’s true artistry, the movie implies, isn’t bound by the prescribed, linear structures of narrative. It’s all about sensation.

What, then, is Charli doing making a narrative film? The Moment dutifully attempts to meet the needs of the form, moving from one plot beat to another, including by using pointedly garish title cards. But the filmmakers seem much more passionate about its look and feel than its screenplay or structure. Aidan Zamiri, a music-video director overseeing his first feature film, assembles a twitchy bricolage of techniques: part vérité slapstick (like This Is Spinal Tap) and part gonzo art flick (think Harmony Korine). As I watched, I thought about how clever the creators must have felt as they mixed Hollywood tropes to portray the psychological horror of selling out.

Mostly, though, I wondered when the movie would end. The Moment is a comedy with almost no effective jokes, a listless sense of pacing, and cinematography that is stylized but really not that stylish. It feels rushed and underdeveloped—the product of too many deadlines, too little patience, or simply the view that vibes are more important than execution.

That view is certainly what has propelled Emerald Fennell into being Hollywood’s most gleefully incoherent filmmaker. As reviewers have noted, the engine of her Wuthering Heights is not emotion or plot but rather the whiplash created by audiovisual juxtapositions—most of which project the dubious theory that Victorian social rules were equivalent to BDSM. I enjoyed my time in the theater but left feeling dazed and manipulated, like I’d been in a loud casino for more than two and a half hours.

Charli’s soundtrack is a full-fledged album—her putative follow-up to Brat, though she’s downplayed the idea that it really counts as that. It also diverges from the tone of Fennell’s movie quite a bit. Whereas the film is madcap and edgy—even bratty—the Wuthering Heights album is sullen and stately, built upon strings and droning electronics. Explaining why the project appealed to her, Charli wrote (on Substack) that she wanted to dive “into a world that felt undeniably raw, wild, sexual, gothic, British, tortured and full of actual real sentences, punctuation and grammar.” She has also repeated the keywords “elegant and brutal” in interviews.

These ideas are—as with The Moment—extremely promising. Answering the question of where she should go after the ebullience of Brat with a stoic seance of an album is smart. Choosing to flip from a memoiristic lyrical style to one inspired by classic literature is smart. And some of these songs are not just smart—they’re sensational. The lead single, “House,” opens with the Velvet Underground’s John Cale delivering a spoken-word poem portraying himself as a vampire of sorts, before distorted guitar kicks in for a jump-scare effect. The satisfyingly noisy sense of liftoff that ensues undoubtedly took a painstaking, iterative process of writing, recording, and mixing to achieve. Then there’s “Chains of Love”: Charli in full Oscar-bait mode, twisting a plaintive chorus into windswept, ballooning shapes with the help of her trusty auto-tune. I can’t stop playing it.

The rest of the album is just fine. Charli is a natural at writing melodies that woodpeck their way into the skull, so the songs work on the level of catchiness. But they don’t develop and complicate themselves in interesting ways. The lyrics string together repetitive and mostly generic metaphors comparing love to death and commitment to confinement. She sings of dying in fires and having her face smashed into stone, but the music drizzles grayly upon the passion she describes. This is a first-draft take on “elegant and brutal,” for sure.

Charli might just be in a low-stakes, post-breakthrough interregnum, exploring whims without putting too much pressure on herself. But from the way she talks about creativity, I have my fears that she thinks first drafts are all she needs. Charli’s praise of world-building echoes the way that marketers and influencers talk. And in the present oversaturated media environment, a common playbook for success is to pursue constant visibility: posting and provoking every day, touting micro-reinventions, to keep the attention of the audience. The mood-board mentality facilitates this need for speed. Assemble reference points, add in your personality, and voilà: a new moment.

Great music transcends moments. And although referential borrowing, high-concept brainstorming, and first-thought-best-thought immediacy drove the work of many classic artists, their greatest works required revision, editing, collaboration, second-guessing, dark nights of the soul, and time. Charli may feel that culture is moving too quickly for her to take the months or years needed to convert ideas into excellence. She may fear that we have no time for masterpieces. But the truth, she may find, is that masterpieces are all we have patience for. And she has the rare ability to give us what we need.

What Happened to the Great American Protest Concert?

2026-02-11T08:00:00-05:00

In early January, at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, a concert benefit for Palestine and Sudan conjured all the fury of an acoustic night at the local coffee shop. Musicians played stripped-down songs on a stage decorated with rugs, floor lamps, and couches. Members of the audience, mostly 20-somethings and teens, leaned in and filmed intimate performances by their favorite cult artists.

But the quiet broke late in the evening when a woman with a mane of red curls walked onstage. Shrieks and screams rang out as people recognized the surprise guest: the 27-year-old superstar Chappell Roan.

I’d come to watch precisely because no one of Roan’s stature had been slated to play what have been, to date, the American music world’s only major communal performances in response to the conflict between Israel and Palestine. The concert, titled Artists for Aid, featured a 20-artist lineup of if-you-know-you-know types—such as the buzz band Geese and the TikTok-beloved Ravyn Lenae—plus Shawn Mendes, a recovering pop heartthrob who hasn’t had a hit in years. The previous two installments of Artists for Aid, which took place in 2024 in New Jersey and London, had received scant media attention. I wanted to find out why a war that has sparked intense outrage worldwide had inspired relatively low-wattage and under-the-radar efforts in American music—and whether that might be changing.

Music is the art form most associated with protest, and its history is full of united actions against war and humanitarian crises. Think of Woodstock-era sung-and-spoken condemnations of the Vietnam War, the 1980s megaconcerts and charity singles inspired by famine in Ethiopia and apartheid in South Africa, and the Rock Against Bush compilations that challenged America’s invasion of Iraq. Only a few years ago, pop music overflowed with sloganeering lyrics and concert rallies related to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and Donald Trump. But in the 2020s, much of that energy has mellowed—or at least been dispersed into individuals’ scattered statements and social-media posts.

Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times / Getty

Chappell Roan performs at the Artists for Aid benefit in Los Angeles.

Gaza is a big part of why. The 2023 Hamas attacks that killed some 1,200 people in Israel, including 378 people at the Nova music festival, spurred a military response that has decimated Gaza and resulted in at least 70,000 deaths. Among countries historically allied with Israel—prime among them the U.S.—the fallout has inflamed tensions over free expression. Though polls show that a majority of Americans now have an unfavorable view of Israel—an 11-point increase from before the war—the ensuing protests have faced unusual social and legal consequences. Universities whose students demonstrated against the war have been subject to sweeping government investigations and sanctions justified as efforts against hate speech. Activists have been targeted for deportation on the basis of protests they’ve been involved in or, in at least one case, because of an op-ed they’d written.

A confluence of factors have made Gaza a particularly risky situation to speak out about. One is the clear and rising tide of anti-Semitism worldwide. Defenders of Israel have often argued that a critique of Zionism is an attack on all Jews—thereby collapsing the distinctions among, for example, the bigoted conspiracy theories of Louis Farrakhan, the extremism of fringe activists who cheer for Hamas, and the moral objections levied by mainstream voices for Palestinian rights (many of whom are Jewish themselves). The bloody history of the conflict has made it so that some people interpret the language of Palestinian liberation as a call for the wanton murder of Israelis. These dynamics have been leveraged by lobbyists for Israel and by politicians of both major U.S. parties to subject the broader pro-Palestine movement to a level of scrutiny way beyond what other contemporary causes have been subject to. Cultural institutions and businesses looking to avoid controversy are motivated to embrace that scrutiny.

The music world has learned this a number of times. Last April, the R&B singer Kehlani was disinvited from a concert at Cornell after a pro-Israel student group flagged her history of strident anti-Zionism, including a music video of hers featuring the phrase “Long live the intifada.” Intifada is an Arabic word for “uprising” that many hear as a call for violence against Jews. Her concert in Central Park was later canceled after the office of New York City’s then-Mayor Eric Adams raised concerns about public safety. In a video message prior to the second cancellation, Kehlani called herself “not anti-Semitic” but rather “anti-genocide.” She also alluded to losing other career opportunities because of her criticism of Israel.

Kehlani, a singer known for her queer sex jams and fixation on astrology, hardly fits the stereotype of a militant. Some of music’s most headline-grabbing advocates for Palestine have been more extreme and faced more extreme consequences. The Irish band Kneecap is a rap trio steeped in the history of Irish republicanism—one member wears a balaclava. They had signaled admiration for terrorist groups—“Up Hamas, up Hezbollah,” shouted one member at a November 2024 concert—before controversy erupted over their pro-Palestine statements at Coachella 2025. After U.K. police opened a terrorism investigation (resulting in a charge against one member that was eventually dropped) and the group lost its visa sponsor in the U.S., Kneecap said they have never supported Hamas or Hezbollah, and that they “condemn all attacks on civilians, always.”

Another example: Last year, the front man of the rap duo Bob Vylan chanted “Death, death to the IDF!” at the Glastonbury Festival in the U.K. Following condemnation from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and the revocation of their visas by the U.S. State Department, the band put out a statement saying: “We are not for the death of Jews, Arabs or any other race or group of people. We are for the dismantling of a violent military machine.” Later, when one of its concert crowds tried to get a “Death to IDF” chant going, Bob Vylan’s vocalist encouraged them to instead say “Free Palestine,” lest the band get in more trouble.

Performers who flirt with murderous rhetoric and ideologies hardly make ideal mascots for the pro-Palestine movement, or for anyone else who advocates to end, not intensify, violence in the Middle East. Even so, these controversies have demonstrated that what artists say about this issue is not treated with the deference that creative expression is traditionally afforded in democracies. Hip-hop, rock and roll, and even country music are full of revolutionary rhetoric and bloodthirsty threats. As First Amendment advocates have had to repeatedly point out lately, a legal distinction exists between making statements and committing or materially supporting violence. When government officials weigh in on what’s acceptable to say onstage, it not only limits the definition of free speech but sends a cautionary message to all kinds of cultural figures: artists, labels, venues.

The music industry wrestled with tensions related to Palestine before October 7. Boycott campaigns against Israel, which have been under way for decades, garnered support from artists including Elvis Costello, Patti Smith, and Questlove. In 2012, pro-Israel forces in the entertainment industry formed the anti-boycott activist group Creative Community for Peace, which was supported by industry figures such as the famous artist manager Scooter Braun and the Atlantic Music Group CEO Elliot Grainge.

Since October 7, many pro-Palestinian artists have said that they feel at odds with prevailing attitudes in their industry. Brian Eno said on Instagram that one of the biggest regrets of his career was that “so many of us have remained silent about Palestine. Often that silence has come from fear—real fear—that speaking out could provoke a backlash, close doors or end a career.” Last year, the trip-hop group Massive Attack formed an alliance intended to support pro-Palestinian artists in the face of “intimidation” from within the industry. More than 1,000 artists and labels have backed a new boycott effort to geo-block their music from being streamed in Israel.

Ronaldo Bolaños / Los Angeles Times / Getty

The audience at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, a concert benefit for Palestine and Sudan in January

But signing a petition is one thing, and organizing a show is another. The storied benefit shows and protests of music history were logistical undertakings that involved many parties—booking agents, promoters, venues, multiple artists. When it comes to Gaza, pulling off such an effort might be especially complex, given how viewpoints and appetites for blowback will vary from party to party. Nevertheless, Eno helped put on a benefit, Together for Palestine, in London last year. And Artists for Aid has emerged as America’s primary musical response—cautiously.

The Artists for Aid shows are benefits, not protests. They have paired advocacy for Palestine with advocacy for the people of Sudan, where a civil war has raged since 2023 and cost at least 150,000 lives. In Los Angeles, $5.5 million were raised for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and the Sudanese American Physicians Association. The model Bella Hadid, one of the two hosts (the other was the actor Pedro Pascal), spoke about “families living through unimaginable loss, displacement, hunger, violence.” The Palestinian American poet Noor Hindi and the Sudanese American poet Safia Elhillo described the devastation of their homelands. But none of the speeches named a protagonist—a state, a leader—responsible for the destruction they mourned.

This circumspection was by design. “I’m trying to be really careful about the way that I present these concerts to the world,” Mustafa, the 29-year-old singer-songwriter who’d organized the venture, told me the day after the concert. Although he anticipated that some critics would find Artists for Aid to be too soft-focus, too vague in its objectives, Mustafa intentionally discouraged political callouts from the stage. The shows were meant to give musicians an opportunity to “communicate their solidarity through song,” he said. “Because that is the thing they practice their whole life. That is the language that they know.”

The circumstances we met in reminded me that the Palestinian cause isn’t without behind-the-scenes support. Mustafa, formerly known as Mustafa the Poet, was staying at a stunning mansion in Bel Air that a donor had rented in order to house a few of the artists who played the show. Pizza boxes were strewn about from the night before, and a few straggling musicians and associates were puttering around, dipping their feet in the infinity pool. Mustafa’s 2024 debut album, Dunya—a folk memoir about growing up as a devout Muslim in a violent Toronto housing project as the son of immigrants from Sudan—was wildly acclaimed. He’s a pop insider who’s had a birthday dinner thrown for him by Drake and who has helped write songs for Justin Bieber, The Weeknd, and the Jonas Brothers.

Despite that industry clout, he told me, he had trouble securing a venue for the benefit. Mustafa said he and his team had approached multiple locations in the Los Angeles area, but most declined the booking without explanation. At one point, after the show had been announced but before a stage had been confirmed, he considered canceling it and releasing “the list of all of the venues that refuse to accept me.” The problem wasn’t demand: The show had sold out within minutes, and scalpers listed tickets online with exorbitant markups. Mustafa had wanted to book an arena that could fit tens of thousands of people. Instead, Artists for Aid ended up in the 6,300-person Shrine Auditorium. “We weren’t in the Shrine by choice,” he said. “Really we were in the Shrine by circumstance.”

Confirming performers wasn’t simple either. According to Mustafa, he secured most of the evening’s lineup himself, coordinating with artists directly via text message, sometimes to the surprise of their managers. But it didn’t seem to be the full bill he’d hoped for. A number of artists who’d signed on to perform backed out just before the show’s announcement, offering what he felt were flimsy excuses. One musician—“I swear to God, one of the bigger artists in the world,” Mustafa said—declined by saying that they didn’t want to invite “the sting of the establishment.”

Taylor Hill / Getty

Mustafa, the 29-year-old singer-songwriter who’d organized the venture, intentionally discouraged political callouts from the stage.

Still, some of the bigger artists in the world did pop up. Roan had called the singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus, who was on the bill, a few days before the show and asked to duet with her. The two ended up playing a wistful cover of the Magnetic Fields’ wry ballad “The Book of Love.” Backstage, Olivia Rodrigo posed for photos. (A few weeks later, Rodrigo announced that she’d covered that same Magnetic Fields song for a compilation album to raise money for War Child UK, a charity helping kids in conflict zones worldwide.)

[Read: Students yelled at me. I’m fine.]

The presence of these Gen Z icons seemed to reflect a generational divide when it comes to musical activism. For years, the most famous mainstream benefits have been headlined by a class of musicians associated with the Democratic establishment—Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry, Alicia Keys. Over the past year, many in that class have continued to work in the familiar mode of anti-Trump resistance, as with Springsteen’s new song about the turmoil in Minneapolis. But Gaza has defied the dynamics of party politics; Roan rejected calls to endorse the Democrats in 2024 because of the party’s support of Israel, among other issues (though she said she voted for Kamala Harris anyway). Artists for Aid was for and largely by the generation that upended American political discourse after October 7 with campus sit-ins, the generation that hardly seems daunted by the crackdowns against them.

Some in the audience wore keffiyehs or T-shirts indicating their activist bona fides. But most just looked like fashionable music fans, flaunting boots and baggy denim while taking selfies. They screamed out wildly for Dacus, Daniel Caesar, Clairo, Faye Webster, and Omar Apollo—young gods of the bedroom-pop pantheon that has flourished in the streaming era. Many of those musicians are among the more than 600 people who’ve signed on to the Artists4Ceasefire effort that began in 2023.

Those artists largely sang their own songs, but certain lyrics and sounds took on a special resonance. The show opened with the Geese front man Cameron Winter, the current It Boy of indie rock and a 23-year-old Jewish person whose music is filled with references to war and God (he played another, smaller Gaza benefit in Ridgewood, Queens, not long after). He sang a gorgeous rendition of an unreleased track called “If You Turn Back Now.” Its fluttering piano runs sent a message: Settle in; focus; feel something.

Is it enough to let the music speak? I’d gone into the concert suspecting it to be a tragically late and modest effort—coming, as it did, after a cease-fire had been brokered and, despite continued violence in the region, a host of other crises had grabbed the public’s attention. And the show itself hardly turned out to be bold in its presentation. But as I watched artist after artist, from a variety of genres, step up, play, and hand the mic on to the next singer—as other performers watched, swaying their heads, from couches around the stage—my cynicism faded. The overlap between an artistic scene, a demographic wave, and a political movement was being made visible and tangible. Many of the musicians and audience members belonged to a generation that’s often stereotyped as languishing in apathy and isolation—but whose indignation about the suffering in Gaza has far outpaced that of other generations. And given all the ambient discouragement against speaking up about this particular cause, solidarity isn’t just a buzzword. It matters that so many of music’s rising guard have gone on the record.

In the weeks since then, I’ve thought back to Artists for Aid’s conscientious approach while a broader thaw has taken place in America regarding protest. The pushback against immigration agents in Minneapolis has been peaceful, coordinated, and focused—and, it seems, has gotten results. At least some of the politicians, celebrities, and business leaders who have fallen into silence or acquiescence during the past year of multifront overreach from the Trump administration are finally saying that something’s amiss in America, if in measured language. Gaza showed how power brokers from the White House on down seem eager for pretexts to punish dissent in ways that create a chilling effect, and that the hottest rhetoric from activists can be exactly that pretext. The effective protest movements to emerge from these circumstances will show wisdom in choosing when to shout and when to communicate by other means.

‘Together, We Are America’

2026-02-09T00:07:34-05:00

In the days and weeks leading up to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, a nervous kind of hype swept America. The 31-year-old artist is, by some measures, the most popular working musician in the world. But because he almost exclusively performs in Spanish and has spoken up against ICE, right-wing commentators suggested he was too political for the time slot, while branding him with various scary synonyms like “provocative” and “divisive.” Just a few hours before the show, the influencer Jake Paul called him “a fake American citizen performing who publicly hates America.”

During his performance on Sunday night, Bad Bunny had an answer for that last one: “God bless America,” he announced. But his entire performance rebuked the notion that he is some culture-war proxy being foisted upon an American public that wants its stars to shut up and sing. Yes, he filled this show with slogans and symbols signaling Puerto Rican and Latino pride at a time when federal agents are menacing Spanish speakers and President Trump has declared English to be the national language. But fundamentally, the halftime was a blast: an instant-classic, precisely detailed, relentlessly stimulating medley rooted in the good old-fashioned pleasure principle.

Bad Bunny opened in what looked like sugarcane fields worked by dancers dressed in the straw hats of jíbaros (Puerto Rico’s rural farmers). Against this pastoral backdrop, Bad Bunny stood looking modern and fly, in a boxy white shirt patterned like an NFL jersey. He was rapping in Spanish to his smash “Tití Me Preguntó,” but the pigskin he held in his hand and the tie around his neck conveyed a clear message to any viewer. He was here for business. He was here to play ball.

[Read: How Bad Bunny did it]

Play he did. As he walked through the tropical hedge maze, he passed by whimsical set pieces including a coconut vendor, a dominoes match, and a construction site manned by—how to put this respectfully—hot girls. This was the first of many awooga visuals to come—mass twerking, a fleeting shot of guy-on-guy grinding, and Bad Bunny executing his trademark crotch thrust. If any of this inspires scandal, it’ll be the healthy kind, giving America a break from fascism discourse to rehash now-quaint-seeming dustups caused by the likes of Elvis, Janet Jackson, and Prince (the originator of what’s becoming a hallowed tradition of Super Bowl halftime crotch-troversies).

Really, what does it say about the state of the nation that the sight of good-looking people doing slinky choreography feels … refreshing? It’s not like the much-publicized conservative cultural wave of the 2020s has rolled back pop culture’s reliance on raunch. But this performance’s wealth of gyration seemed subtly throwback-y and weirdly wholesome. Maybe that was because the smiles on everyone’s faces conveyed sexiness without porniness. The dancing and costumes took me back to being a young teen watching the airbrushed sultriness of early-2000s MTV and being intrigued by the world that allegedly existed somewhere outside my home.

Bad Bunny was indeed trying to take viewers out of their home, and into his. The sheer volume of references to Puerto Rico defied any notion that the island is a minor player in American culture; rather, we were reminded that it’s a powerhouse domestic and global exporter. Puerto Rico gave us the archetypal reggaeton hit, Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina,” which popped up for a few moments tonight. Its musicians helped invent salsa music—which provided much-needed syncopation when Lady Gaga appeared to sing her normally plodding hit “Die With a Smile.” It gave us the square jaw and honeyed voice of Ricky Martin, who sang as well. And it gave us the night’s headliner, who nodded at the significance of his own success when he handed a Grammy to a boy who looked like he might grow up to one day be, well, Bad Bunny.

Eventually, the energy of the performance shifted from party to statement piece—yet smart stagecraft made that shift feel climactic rather than deflating. Exploding power lines evoked the electrical outages that have plagued Puerto Rico in recent years. For most of the show, Bad Bunny had been mugging merrily to the camera, flaring his eyes and making hammy gestures to illustrate his words. But now anger seemed to twitch in his face as he rapped his song “El Apagón” (“The Power Outage”). Through affect alone, he got across a sense of betrayal that many Puerto Ricans of his age—commonly called the “crisis generation”—have spoken of feeling after a string of political scandals and natural disasters amid ongoing gentrification by mainlanders.

That message was, indeed, political. So was his culminating statement of “God bless America,” which he followed by listing countries in North and South America, thereby asserting the transnational nature of the culture that he represents. Pushing toward the camera with throngs of drummers, he closed by holding up a football with a message on it: Together, We Are America. It was a pointed message but also a conciliatory one, a unity slogan. Some people were going to look for a fight anyway. “Nobody understands a word this guy is saying,” complained Trump on Truth Social, minutes after the performance, “and the dancing is disgusting.”

The Big Message of the 2026 Grammys

2026-02-02T01:16:59-05:00

Like a lot of immigrants lately—like a lot of Americans lately—Trevor Noah is mulling life after the United States. Early in this year’s Grammys, during an interlude between speeches and performances, the ceremony’s host asked Bad Bunny a question: “If things keep getting worse in America, can I come live with you in Puerto Rico?”

Bad Bunny grimaced and stated the obvious: Puerto Rico is in America. Noah tried to shush him, saying, “Don’t tell them that.”

This jokey segment set the table for what turned out to be Bad Bunny’s night, at a time when the country is roiling in conflict over the nature of American identity. One week before the 31-year-old singer and rapper Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio will take the stage at the Super Bowl halftime show, he won three trophies, including the night’s final prize, Album of the Year. He was among a raft of stars who spoke out on behalf of immigrants and against ICE from the stage—but his wins, and his words, met the moment in a unique way. He’s become a political flashpoint because of where he comes from and what language he speaks, and he’s not pretending otherwise.

His first win of the night was for Best Música Urbana Album—a category established in 2022 to celebrate the ascendant strain of Spanish-language popular music of which Bad Bunny is the undisputed king. The award was presented by the Cuban Dominican American Saturday Night Live actor Marcello Hernández and the Colombian pop star Karol G, who riffed about the Spanish-language music their parents played around the house when they were kids. The nominees in this year’s Música Urbana category, Hernández said, are the musicians he himself will someday play around the house for his own kids.

“Before I say thanks to God, I’m gonna say, ‘ICE out,’” Bad Bunny said during his speech for this award. “We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.” The terms he used echoed ones that Donald Trump and his followers have used to describe immigrants over the past year. Bad Bunny underplayed his anger, speaking with quiet intensity, and ended with a call to avoid hatred and to fight back with love.

The phrase he had used, “ICE out,” was inscribed on pins sported by a number of artists at the Grammys. The 26-year-old British singer Olivia Dean, accepting the award for Best New Artist, began her speech by pointing out that she is a granddaughter of an immigrant. She added, “I’m a product of bravery, and I think those people deserve to be celebrated.” When Billie Eilish won the award for Song of the Year, she said, “No one is illegal on stolen land”—a common slogan at anti-ICE protests.

[Read: How Bad Bunny did it]

That Bad Bunny won Album of the Year wasn’t a huge shock: His 2025 album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, is a commercial smash and a critical darling that earned him his fourth year of being the most streamed artist in the world. What’s more, this is the first year in which all the members of the voting body for the Latin Grammys were invited to vote in the main Grammys. Even so, Bad Bunny didn’t seem like he took the victory for granted. When the singer Harry Styles, presenting the night’s big award, read out Bad Bunny’s name, the rapper looked down and covered his face with his hand. All evening, he’d looked slick and dapper in a tuxedo with corsetlike stitching on the back. Now the room was cheering, but Bad Bunny was silent and tearing up.

The speech he gave was primarily in Spanish. This also was no surprise, given that Bad Bunny only ever performs in his native language. But it was also a reminder of the historic nature of his win: Debí Tirar Más Fotos is the first Album of the Year sung entirely in Spanish. “I want to dedicate this award to all the people that had to leave their homeland, their country, to follow their dreams,” he said in the speech’s brief English portion. Then, in Spanish, he dedicated his win to all Latinos and the artists who deserved to be on the stage before him.

Many MAGA-aligned voices have complained about Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl booking by insinuating that he is un-American, divisive, and a tool of the left’s agenda. To them, his Grammys win will likely be taken as just another offense. But the ceremony ended up being a reminder of how facile most of those complaints are. Spanish speakers and immigrants are already embedded in American life, culture, and music. To reject that reality is to reject someone like Bad Bunny, who is, by any definition, an American success story.

Rage in the U.S.A.

2026-01-29T12:55:12-05:00

The first few strums of Bruce Springsteen’s new song make you feel like you’re in for, well, a Bruce Springsteen song—a rollicking sing-along about rough-and-tumble but ultimately hopeful times in some troubled American town. And this song, “Streets of Minneapolis,” is exactly that.

It’s also a response to ICE’s bloody record in Minneapolis. It excoriates, by name, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and “Trump’s federal thugs.” It memorializes Alex Pretti and Renee Good—the Americans killed by federal agents—and the “whistles and phones” still in use by demonstrators. The song’s considerable power lies in the way it transposes a classic, even hoary, mode of protest rock into the present. Springsteen conveys that we’re living through a time that will be sung about for years to come, and that the future depends a lot on what we do in this moment.

Springsteen has made many protest songs: the inequality elegy of “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” the post-9/11 rallying cry of “The Rising,” the Vietnam-veteran anthem “Born in the U.S.A.” As a reaction to law-enforcement overreach, “Minneapolis” especially recalls Springsteen’s 2000 song “American Skin (41 Shots),” about the police killing of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed Black man. And across his catalog, Springsteen’s concrete lyricism and drawling vocals channel folk music’s titans of protest, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. Here, those influences are worn proudly, ringing out in a buoyant harmonica solo.

But the song that “Minneapolis” most evokes is Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1970 touchstone, “Ohio,” recorded after the National Guard killed four students during a protest at Kent State University. “Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,” sang Neil Young in a scene-setting verse; “King Trump’s private army from the DHS,” sings Springsteen now. Here we are again, late in a culture war, with a champion of a supposed silent majority breaking norms and pushing polarization. Here we are again as armed agents menace civilians. “Ohio” crystallized a moment that had already captured national attention, but it also invited listeners to suss out where they stand. “What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?” Young asked. “How can you run when you know?”

“Streets of Minneapolis” doesn’t bother with questions. Its mission is to rouse in the manner of drinking songs, which its sloping melodies and gang-sung harmonies evoke. Springsteen has sounded bitter before, and mournful, but never this purely angry. His voice slithers and spits, reserving extra phlegm for the names of Donald Trump and his allies. Grace and warmth peek out in strategic moments as well, like the chorus’s oh-so-slowly intoned slant rhymes: the words Minneapolis, stranger in our midst, and—the poignance of this one took a moment to understand—26.

Twenty-six as in 2026: the exotic-sounding name of this new year in a decade that remains baffling more than halfway through. Who expected to be living this far in the future and yet trapped in the same old story? One can trace Minneapolis back not only to Kent State but also to the civil-rights movement, and to the labor riots and fascist takeovers abroad that inspired Guthrie. The details change, but the fundamental shape of the struggle remains stubbornly familiar: On one side, gun-toting agents of the establishment; on the other, advocates for the freedom of the less powerful. The clashes result in deaths that get called “senseless” but take on enduring symbolic weight thanks to songs just like this one.

[Read: What Hollywood gets wrong about Springsteen]

To be clear, “Minneapolis” is not “Ohio,” a paradigm-pushing masterpiece. Springsteen’s language—“thugs,” “King Trump,” “they trample on our rights”—is more Facebook post than poetry. The wordplay about fire and ice and ICE is cheap. The music is heavy-footed and formulaic. The immediate acclaim for it makes the critic in me a little resentful: Artists of all kinds routinely make songs engaging with their times, but so often these days, prestige is reserved for the music that copies the Boomers’ glory days. However, as this song suggests, that era shines in the public memory for a reason.

After sitting with “Streets of Minneapolis,” I tried again to get into Jesse Welles, a 33-year-old folk singer who makes scathingly anti-Trump songs with titles such as “Join ICE” and “No Kings.” Musically, he imitates Dylan and Springsteen to the point of parody. The way the media and rock institutions have embraced him—he’s played Stephen Colbert, performed with Joan Baez, and is up for four Grammys this year—implies that he is the great hope for musical resistance, but his blend of modern buzzwords with Woodstock aesthetics has struck my ear as injuriously hokey.

This Springsteen song has changed my ear a bit. I’m starting to hear Welles and other singers like him—we’re in a bit of a boom for conscientious folk rock—a little more generously. That they’re singing at all, and that anyone is listening, really does matter. Culture, we all know, has become fractured. The easiest way for Trump to get everything he wants is for his opponents to fail to speak in a unified voice. Thinking back to the last time such unity seemed possible isn’t nostalgic—it’s practical.

Trump’s Golden Age of Culture Seems Pretty Sad So Far

2026-01-20T07:30:00-05:00

Sparklers sizzled, boom-badoom-boom bass thumped, and Nicki Minaj emerged onstage at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest last month to deliver the latest plot twist in an exhausting year for politics and pop culture. The rapper—whose straight black hair reached the hem of her sleek minidress—sat down with Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, who sported medieval-princess blond braids and waves. Then Minaj tore into previous presidential administrations for being un-Christian and uncool. “We can’t let people like that be in power, you guys,” she said, flaring her eyes like she does in the video for her song “Stupid Hoe.”

Minaj arrived in America at age 5 as an undocumented immigrant from Trinidad, and is still not, she said in 2024, an American citizen. Her music uses pornographic profanity to assert herself as a man-eating empress, and her fans—many of them queer—don pink wigs and call themselves “Barbz,” after Barbie. Yet here she was at a conference co-founded by Charlie Kirk, a defender of traditional gender roles who just last year called Minaj a poor role model for young Black women. Here she was, praising Donald Trump as the handsome redeemer of American pride.

Ever since the president danced with the Village People during last year’s inauguration weekend, the Trumpian right has been disorienting America with this kind of spectacle. Trolling and tackiness, often crossbred with left-coded pop songs and hot memes, have served to wish a new zeitgeist into existence. Consume only the output of MAGA’s multifront media efforts, and you may come to feel that the country is coalescing into pep-rally unity on Trump’s behalf. Minaj’s appearance at the Turning Point event gave the right a trophy to flaunt, signaling who the popular kids really are.

Any follower of Minaj’s knows what’s behind this kind of bravado. Like the killer doll Chucky, which she often references, or perhaps like Elon Musk wielding a chainsaw, her persona—big grin, nasty words—conveys cheerful cruelty. But it’s a performance of embattlement, not dominance—the offensive defense of someone everyone thinks of as “the bad guy,” per her song “Chun-Li.” She constantly seems beset by haters, rivals, and (in recent years) a public that doesn’t stream her music as much as she demands. Seeing her onstage drove home the desperation that has also defined MAGA’s imagery this past year, whether the example was ICE arrests turned into adorable anime or recruitment posters drawn in the same pastoral style as 1930s Germany. The president’s aesthetics are wackily fascist—but American culture, for now, remains peskily democratic.

Trump’s return to office was widely portrayed as christening a new definition of chic. Young voters and voters of color had swung in his direction, thanks partly to the influence of podcasts, livestreams, and other media formats that now compete with traditional news outlets and cultural institutions. The attendance of tech barons, comedians, and content creators at Trump’s inauguration indicated that the so-called alternative media was now the mainstream—and openly pro-Trump. Its touchstones appeared to be recently booming phenomena including country music, TikTok tradwives, and mixed martial arts.

Trump quickly began consolidating his cultural power by focusing on the old media that hadn’t fallen in line. He strong-armed news networks, intervened in Hollywood mergers, overtook and renamed the Kennedy Center, slashed public-broadcasting budgets, and recast the White House press corp. These efforts have borne results: sycophantic press conferences, DEI rollbacks at movie studios, a news chief at CBS whose nightly broadcast has delivered a “salute” to Marco Rubio and spent a mere 16 seconds covering the fifth anniversary of January 6.

These authoritarian-scented measures, combined with MAGA’s apparent command of new media, gestured at what Trump really needed to achieve his full agenda: cultural pacification and control. His policies are, however else you describe them, disruptive. Mass deporting migrants, brazenly axing federal grants and jobs, pursuing an inflationary trade war, risking the lives of soldiers to trouble the sovereignty of hemispheric neighbors—these things are shaking the everyday lives of Americans. Seeking a third term, as he has hinted at doing, would redefine the presidency itself. Such drastic measures should mean, in a free and open democracy, powerful pushback vented not only through the political process but also through artists and audiences.

Outcry has, indeed, resulted—though less of it, and less sharply rendered, than one might expect. Trump’s first term spurred the indefatigable and angry Resistance, with its mocking “tiny hands” imagery and battalion of celebrities. This time, the popular protest movement is “No Kings,” which has made a point of presenting itself as a vague and upbeat pro-democracy effort. Once-outspoken entertainers have been a bit quieter of late as well. The actor Jennifer Lawrence told The New York Times that the past decade has discouraged her from using her platform for politics.

The animated pushback to ICE in Minneapolis over recent weeks marks a return to a more confrontational style of protest. But the situation in that city has also demonstrated MAGA’s methods for stigmatizing dissent. The death of the activist Renee Nicole Good at the hands of an immigration agent has been justified on the right in a fashionable tone of detachment. The right-wing pundit Erick Erickson labeling Good an “AWFUL”—an Affluent White Female Urban Liberal—stereotypes the opposition as not just wrongheaded but cringe, so cringe it doesn’t matter at all.

Yet, in important ways, the cultural feedback loop remains intact and significant. Take the Jimmy Kimmel incident. In September, the talk-show host seemed to imply, incorrectly, that Kirk’s killer was a MAGA supporter. The Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, threatened ABC, Kimmel’s network, which announced his show’s indefinite removal from its time slot. The ensuing outcry from the public, including from alt-media figures such as Joe Rogan, was deafening, and Kimmel quickly returned to the air. One lesson from that episode: Whatever motives underlay ABC’s initial decision, they were not powerful enough to justify the mess it caused.

Another lesson is that the same ecosystem that helped elect Trump is also independent from him. Rogan, the superstar podcaster credited with helping sway the 2024 election, has not only griped about Kimmel; he’s also questioned the White House’s immigration crackdown and tariffs. Andrew Schulz, another popular comedian and podcaster, declared that Trump’s foreign policy and spending bills are “the exact opposite of everything I voted for.” The streamer Adin Ross, who gave Trump a car during the 2024 campaign, now says he regrets ever talking politics, because it’s had the effect of tarnishing his brand.

[Read: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture?]

None of these figures has exactly gone blue, but their griping is in line with what polls have shown about Trump’s softening support among young people, men, and people of color. His appeal to those groups in 2024, it seems, was rooted in something other than stereotypical MAGA loyalty. The “freethinking” moniker that Rogan and others give themselves can seem risible—they’re so freethinking that they’re willing to entertain conspiracy theories and superstition—but it does, in fact, have some basis in truth.

Caylo Seals / Getty

And though the government can threaten the licenses of news networks, the internet is more difficult to tame. To be sure, Musk’s overhaul of X to make it friendlier to white nationalists, Mark Zuckerberg’s rollback of Meta’s moderation regime, and TikTok’s Trump-assisted sale to a group of investors led by the conservative billionaire Larry Ellison all suggest the extent to which web culture can be shaped and distorted by its platforms. But a podcaster is still just someone with a mic and an audience. Short of outright criminalizing dissent or resorting to mafioso intimidation—neither out of the question—Trump has no simple recourse against the online crowd other than the one he has always had, the one that politicians in a democracy are supposed to use: persuasion.

One person who understood persuasion was Charlie Kirk, whose killing might be the most culturally consequential development of the past year. Kirk grasped how the internet has changed America, but his death has demonstrated—and, disturbingly, may have resulted from—the fundamentally anarchic nature of those changes.

Kirk rose to prominence by bridging the roles of activist, influencer, and party spokesman in a manner that connected with young people and shaped consensus on the right. In early 2025, he helped diminish GOP opposition to RFK Jr.’s confirmation as health secretary by vowing to organize primary challengers. He later downplayed the delayed release of the Jeffrey Epstein files by saying he held “trust” in his “friends in the government to do what needs to be done”—a position that only someone who’d himself accrued enormous trust from his followers could possibly maintain.

After Kirk’s death, all sorts of narratives started to break down. For example, his alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a highly online young, white, male video gamer—which is to say, he is the kind of person who was thought to be driving America’s conservative wave. But according to evidence cited by police, he saw Kirk as a font of “hate.” Immediately after the shooting, he logged on to the social network Discord to chat with his friends, suggesting that he was performing for the sort of micro-audience upon which the nation’s fragmented culture is now built. (Robinson has not yet entered a plea of guilt or innocence.)

Kirk’s allies quickly tried to tell a new story—one of Kirk as sacred martyr. When others questioned that portrayal by citing Kirk’s more callous stances—on immigrants, guns, and trans people—Trump saw an opportunity to further pursue his anti-dissent agenda. His administration began labeling liberal advocacy groups as terrorists. J. D. Vance encouraged the punishment of anyone seen celebrating Kirk’s death. At least 600 people were subsequently fired from their jobs for social-media posts and public statements, some of which extolled the murder and some of which just quoted the victim’s own words.

But months later, the campaign to sanctify Kirk appears to have backfired in some ways. Gen Z and Gen Alpha’s highly ironic meme ecosystem has embraced what’s called “Kirkification”: the use of AI to meld Kirk’s face with all sorts of characters—superheroes, rappers, porn actors. The intentions of the Kirkifiers vary wildly. Some meme makers are admirers of Kirk who want to valorize him; some are neo-Nazis out to mock Kirk for not being extreme enough (while also drawing attention to their cause); some are liberals trying to troll conservatives; many are surely apolitical types having a nonsensical laugh. In most cases, the effect is to flout any top-down insistence on reverence, a party line, or a unified myth.

The assassination of Trump’s best mouthpiece also destabilized the online right. With Kirk gone, doubts and disagreements about Israel, tariffs, and—the big one—Epstein have spun out in a variety of directions. They’ve been stoked by a class of influencer pundits, such as Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes, who are angling to fill the cultural vacuum left by Kirk. But unlike him, they profess no particular fealty to a party establishment. They are moving by the logic of online entertainment, which, at this moment, is driven by demand for conspiracy theories and conflict—in opposition, at times, to MAGA itself.

Meanwhile, traditional opposition has been enduring a demoralization campaign via federally funded trolling. Stunts such as taking over the Kennedy Center and snarkily relabeling presidential portraits should be understood partly as efforts to exhaust opponents while letting supporters feel like they’re in on a joke. The maxims “Don’t feed the trolls” and “Don’t take the bait” can seem like enlightened responses—but in effect, they serve Trump’s need for cultural pacification.

Perhaps this is why the administration has taken the bizarre step of actively seeking confrontations with celebrities. Government-run social-media accounts have been posting political “fancams”—highlight reels that stans make to celebrate their obsessions—set to music and sounds by popular entertainers. One video pairs photos of Trump with the swooning sound of a Taylor Swift song; another mashes up a video snippet of the comedian Theo Von and shots of immigrants getting deported.

These clips work on the level of propaganda by portraying Trump’s agenda as swashbuckling and hip. But they also create ultimatums for entertainers. Should stars who object to the use of their work publicly complain—as did Von, a Trump-friendly podcaster who nevertheless didn’t like being associated with the immigration crackdowns? Or should they stay above the fray—as has Swift, a onetime Trump critic whose silence on politics over the past year has unnerved some of her fans? Or should they go meta—as did the singer SZA, who wrote on X that the administration was “rage baiting artists for free promo”?

Complaining certainly seems like a headache. In December, in another video, Sabrina Carpenter’s puppy-love anthem “Juno” was paired with deportation imagery. In response, the singer posted, “This video is evil and disgusting. Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.” The White House then shot back a statement that referenced her lyrics, asking whether she was “stupid” or “slow.” When Variety asked the government about its use of Swift’s music, a spokesperson said, “We made this video because we knew fake-news media brands like Variety would breathlessly amplify them. Congrats, you got played.”

Obnoxiousness like that is probably best understood as an attempt at reverse psychology. The administration’s fancam videos generate millions of views, and many attempts to not “amplify” Trump have only proved counterproductive. To a casual internet scroller, seeing these videos circulate without controversy might imply acquiescence from the performers featured in them. And acquiescence can be contagious. In other words, the administration may be systematically testing cultural figures out of the understanding that they still hold sway. They can still speak out, and it still matters if they do, or if they don’t. So they probably should.

As for Minaj, she’s an example of what MAGA leaders likely dream of gaining from their trolling efforts: support. The rapper began her open flirtation with the right in November by reposting an official White House video that used one of her songs. After she publicly expressed concern about reports of persecution of Christians in Nigeria, the administration brought her to address a United Nations panel on the topic. Soon she was writing on X that Trump and Vance were “the good guys,” and she started feuding with Gavin Newsom.

During Trump’s first administration, Minaj expressed horror at his immigration policies. Theories now abound as to what changed since she said, in 2020, that she’s “not gonna jump on the Donald Trump bandwagon.” One common explanation is that she’s shopping for a pardon for her husband, who was convicted of attempted rape in 1995. Others point out that she has alienated much of the music industry by feuding with liberal stars including Jay-Z, Cardi B, and Megan Thee Stallion. Jay-Z is the head of the team that programs the Super Bowl halftime show; might Minaj want to headline Turning Point USA’s alternative halftime show?

But maybe her conversion is genuine. As she talked onstage with Erika Kirk, Minaj’s voice ached while she described her own journey with Christianity. She was raised as a devout churchgoer, lapsed in her faith as she rose to stardom, and now wants to come back into the fold. I thought of Little Richard, Prince, Ye, and other colorful, crass pop predecessors of Minaj’s who were shaped by the church in early life and turned to conservative Christianity in midlife. Maybe Minaj is undergoing a very normal journey for someone like her—simply at an abnormal time in American history.

When I opened up social media after her Turning Point appearance, my feeds were full of Barbz renouncing their membership in what had been the most loyal and fervent of all pop fandoms. I saw Minaj sparring with critics and critics sparring with one another. I had the strange thought that Minaj and the dustup around her is an example of the speech rights that have survived the past year—and I felt grateful for all of the competing forces and factions that remain too complex for politics to control.

How Bad Bunny Did It

2026-01-11T09:00:00-05:00

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A few years ago, I visited my childhood home and heard a surprising sound: the bright and bouncy music of the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny. My parents are white Baby Boomers who speak no Spanish and have never shown a taste for hip-hop, but they’d somehow gotten into Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, whose sex-and-rum-drenched lyrics they couldn’t begin to decipher. The vector of transmission appeared to be the streaming service hooked to their smart speakers. When in need of a pick-me-up, Mom would shout, “Alexa, play Bad Bunny,” and make her Southern California kitchen sound like a San Juan nightclub.

Stories like this help explain how Bad Bunny has reached across language barriers to dominate pop domestically and abroad. Since uploading his first single in 2016, he’s broken U.S. sales records and claimed the title of the most streamed artist on Spotify in four separate years. His popularity, high standing with critics, and duration of success make him a peer—and sometimes a better-selling one—of such contemporary titans as Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Kendrick Lamar. Like them, he’s figured out that 21st-century-pop success is achieved by assembling excitingly hybrid sounds around an iron core of identity. In his case, that means performing almost exclusively in Spanish.

Many Latin American singers have enjoyed cross-over fame before, but none has done it in the way Bad Bunny has, or at the same scale. Before streaming, they couldn’t: Major-market radio DJs, record-label execs, and the media still decided what constituted the American mainstream, and conventional wisdom said that audiences preferred music whose lyrics they could understand. Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias, and Shakira cracked U.S. markets only after they started singing in English. Rare exceptions, such as “Macarena,” by Los del Río, didn’t even confer name recognition upon their creators.

But the internet has revealed popular desires that last century’s gatekeepers didn’t know how to exploit. Bad Bunny arose from a transnational scene—widely called música urbana—whose primary audience is Spanish speakers, including the 44 million who live in the United States. Streaming has also helped English-only audiences connect with his music, just as it has for K-pop and Afrobeat. This month, Bad Bunny will occupy a cultural stage once reserved for America’s classic-rock gods and pop goddesses: the Super Bowl halftime show.

Bad Bunny has touted his game-day gig as a triumph for Latino—particularly Puerto Rican—representation. And in plain ways, his ascendance contradicts Donald Trump’s decree, made last March, that English is the sole national language. MAGA voices attacked the “crazy” decision by the “woke” NFL to book someone who’s not “a unifying entertainer.” They cited Bad Bunny’s political stances (he doesn’t want ICE outside his concerts) and gender-bending fashion (his biceps look great in a minidress). But they also tend to express the view that he, though an American citizen, is somehow un-American. The conservative activist group Turning Point USA is planning an alternative halftime show; in a poll sent to its supporters about what they’d like to see, the first option was “anything in English.”

The truth is that Bad Bunny’s rise is plenty American, and not simply because it reinforces the pluralistic ideals that Trump’s movement seeks to diminish. Bad Bunny’s music has reached all corners of the planet because it is a state-of-the-art product; he is a victor in the ever more crowded race for the freshest and most broadly appealing sound. Language barriers have turned out to be yet another bit of old friction that the internet has sanded down to create a cosmopolitan, commercialized middle ground. Does what’s lost in translation matter?

[From the November 2022 issue: Jaquira Díaz on the case for Puerto Rican independence]

At the center of Bad Bunny’s sound is the rhythm that has ruled Latin American pop for decades: reggaeton, which marries dancehall and rap in crisp, minimalist fashion. Inspiring partying often with just a drum machine and a vocalist, reggaeton first flourished as the sound of working-class urban life in Puerto Rico. “This is where I was born, and so was reggaeton, just so you know,” Bad Bunny boasts in Spanish in one song.

He also grew up as a highly online Millennial at a time when American pop culture was ruled by Fall Out Boy’s pop punk, Lady Gaga’s synth pop, and Drake’s rap blues. All of those touchstones now inform his maximalist take on reggaeton. In any given Bad Bunny song, the melodies roll and sway between emo dejection and childlike glee, the electronic beats call to mind Nintendo games, and the low end churns as ominously as a lava pit. Bad Bunny’s vocal tone is unique: husky and flat, peppered with gasps and grunts, and shimmering with digital effects. He sounds like a ringmaster in a futuristic circus, and you don’t need to know Spanish to feel that a thrilling story is unfolding.

Indeed, Bad Bunny’s success with English-speaking audiences might seem to answer the perennial music-fan debate about how important lyrics really are. Any Rolling Stones listener oblivious to what Mick Jagger is yowling about knows that the art form’s pleasures don’t require intelligibility. And the ideals of enlightened music appreciation dictate that listening to music you don’t understand can be a mind-expanding exercise. As David Byrne once put it, “To restrict your listening to English-language pop is like deciding to eat the same meal for the rest of your life.”

Music, however, is also a form of communication. That’s especially the case in the tradition Bad Bunny builds on: hip-hop, in which narrative, persona, and wordplay are crucial. He raps with intoxicating fluidity, stringing syllables together in a steady murmur that encourages close listening. Translations get you only part of the way to comprehending this aspect of his appeal. His themes are largely the same as those of English-language pop rappers—success, partying, and girls. (Lots of girls: “Me gustan mucho las Gabriela, las Patricia, las Nicole, las Sofía,” goes his smash “Tití Me Preguntó,” a little black book in song form.) But as I read along, I can sense all the things I’m missing: puns, connotations, references.

Even some fluent Spanish speakers may feel similarly. He raps in a Caribbean dialect that is “full of so many skipped consonants, Spanglish, neologisms, and argot that it borders on Creole,” the Puerto Rican anthropology professor Yarimar Bonilla wrote in The New York Times. Bad Bunny’s success proves the cliché that music is a universal language, but it also highlights how universality can shear art from its social context—of which, in this artist’s case, there is a lot.

Bad Bunny has taken care to make his most important messages clear through not only lyrics but also videos, album art, and interviews. He’s more than a Puerto Rican Casanova with an ear for appealing musical pastiche. He’s also a protest artist, and part of what he’s protesting is the very process by which he has become so famous.

The title of his latest album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (or “I Should Have Taken More Photos”), expresses a sense of loss about the culture he grew up in. The cover image is of two empty chairs against a backdrop of banana trees. The songs long for friends and neighbors who have emigrated. A short film released with the album portrays an old man visiting a San Juan coffee shop only to find that it has been gentrified beyond recognition—filled with tourists and digital nomads scarfing overpriced vegan quesitos. (The video also features a talking toad belonging to an endangered local species.)

Bad Bunny is articulating the surreal and sad feeling of seeing his homeland transformed by internet-supercharged globalization. The U.S. territory’s economy has long relied on tourism, but in recent years, a wave of laptop-toting mainlanders lured by the balmy climate and notoriously loose tax laws has driven rent increases and threatened to wash out the local identity. Bad Bunny’s new album, Bonilla wrote, is a “lament for a Puerto Rico slipping through our fingers: betrayed by its leaders; its neighborhoods displaced for luxury developments; its land sold to outsiders, subdivided by Airbnb and crypto schemes and repackaged as paradise for others.”

[Read: The Bad Bunny video that captures the cost of gentrification]

Bad Bunny seeks not just to point out the problem of displacement, but also to do something about it. He’s portrayed his refusal to sing in English as a proactive maneuver against the pressures of Anglo-assimilation. On his latest tour, he skipped the continental U.S. entirely, citing fears that ICE agents would target his concerts. Instead, he hosted a 31-show residency in San Juan, the title of which, No me quiero ir de aquí, means “I Don’t Want to Leave Here.” He has campaigned for the island’s independence and against its potential statehood. One song on the new album spotlights Hawaii—a tourist playground whose natives have been utterly marginalized—as an example of the fate that could befall Puerto Rico if its residents do not resist the influence from their north.

Yet, inevitably, Bad Bunny’s worldwide fame is bound up in the same cycle he bemoans. Though many tickets for his concert residency were set aside for locals, the gambit of course attracted outsiders to the island. Some made a pilgrimage to the supermarket where he once worked in his hometown of Vega Baja. One was shot and killed in La Perla, a poor San Juan neighborhood that began to attract tourists only after being featured in the video for Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s 2017 reggaeton smash, “Despacito.”

In this context, Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl booking represents an uneasy trade. He gets to perform on America’s most watched stage—expressing his vision on a grand scale in ways that could energize his fans and expand his audience. The NFL not only gets a popular performer to juice ratings; it gets to advertise itself to the Spanish-speaking world at a time when professional football is eyeing the global market share of soccer and other sports, eager to carve out a niche. Some might say that the NFL is a mainland-American institution with colonial ambitions, and that Bad Bunny is now part of that effort.

Exports, imports, migration, melding—the costs of these historical engines of change and progress are now the preoccupation of popular art and politics. In a strange way, MAGA and Bad Bunny are each responding to versions of the same 21st-century phenomenon: the decoupling of culture and geography, which has left so many people—wherever they were born—feeling strangely placeless and adrift. But the cruel absurdities and dark historical parallels of Trump’s nationalist agenda reflect how perverse, and ultimately futile, strident identity protectionism is in 2026. American country music has been catching on abroad; American listeners have KPop Demon Hunters fever. And the Super Bowl will be headlined by an artist who seems sure he can create something meaningful out of interconnectivity—something that’s his own, no matter how much it’s shared.

This article appears in the February 2026 print edition with the headline “How Bad Bunny Did It.”

AI Is Democratizing Music. Unfortunately.

2025-12-22T08:00:00-05:00

Human beings may have sung before they spoke. Scientists from Charles Darwin onward have speculated that, for our early ancestors, music predated—and possibly formed the basis of—language. The “singing Neanderthals” theory is a reminder that humming and drumming are fundamental aspects of being human. Even babies have some musical instinct, as anyone who’s watched a toddler try to bang their tray to a beat knows.

This ought to be kept in mind when evaluating the rhetoric surrounding the topic of music made by artificial intelligence. This year, the technology created songs that amassed millions of listens and inspired major-label deals. The pro and anti sides have generally coalesced around two different arguments: one saying AI will leach humanity out of music (which is bad), and the other saying it will further democratize the art form (which is good). The truth is that AI is already doing something stranger. It’s opening a Pandora’s box that will test what we, as a society, really want from music.

The case against AI music feels, to many, intuitive. The model for the most popular platform, Suno, is trained on a huge body of historical recordings, from which it synthesizes plausible renditions of any genre or style the user asks for. This makes it, debatably, a plagiarism machine (though, as the company argued in its response to copyright-infringement lawsuits from major labels last year, “The outputs generated by Suno are new sounds”). The technology also seems to devalue the hard work, skill, and knowledge that flesh-and-blood musicians take pride in—and threaten the livelihoods of those musicians. Another problem: AI music tends to be, and I don’t know how else to put this, creepy. When I hear a voice from nowhere reciting auto-generated lyrics about love, sadness, and partying all night, I often can’t help but feel that life itself is being mocked.

Aversion to AI music is so widespread that corporate interests are now selling themselves as part of the resistance. iHeartRadio, the conglomerate that owns most of the commercial radio stations in the country as well as a popular podcast network, recently rolled out a new tagline: “Guaranteed Human.” Tom Poleman, its president, decreed that the company won’t employ AI personalities or play songs that have purely synthetic lead vocals. Principles may underlie this decision, but so does marketing. Announcing the policy, Poleman cited research showing that although 70 percent of consumers “say they use AI as a tool,” 90 percent “want their media to be from real humans.”

The AI companies have been refining a counterargument: Their technology actually empowers humanity. In November, a Suno employee named Rosie Nguyen posted on X that when she was a little girl, in 2006, she aspired to be a singer, but her parents were too poor to pay for instruments, lessons, or studio time. “A dream I had became just a memory, until now,” she wrote. Suno, which can turn a lyric or hummed melody into a fully written song in an instant, was “enabling music creation for everyone,” including kids like her.

Paired with a screenshot of an article about the company raising $250 million in funding and being valued at $2.5 billion, Nguyen’s story triggered outrage. Critics pointed out that she was young exactly at the time when free production software and distribution platforms enabled amateurs to make and distribute music in new ways. A generation of bedroom artists turned stars has shown that people with talent and determination will find a way to pursue their passions, whether or not their parents pay for music lessons. The eventual No. 1 hitmaker Steve Lacy recorded some early songs on his iPhone; Justin Bieber built an audience on YouTube.

But Nguyen wasn’t totally wrong. AI does make the creation of professional-sounding recordings more accessible—including to people with no demonstrated musical skills. Take Xania Monet, an AI “singer” whose creator was reportedly offered a $3 million record contract after its songs found streaming success. Monet is the alias of Telisha “Nikki” Jones, a 31-year-old Mississippi entrepreneur who used Suno to convert autobiographical poetry into R&B. The creator of Bleeding Verse, an AI “band” that has drawn ire for outstreaming established emo-metal acts, told Consequence that he’s a former concrete-company supervisor who came across Suno through a Facebook ad.

[Read: The people outsourcing their thinking to AI]

These examples raise all sorts of questions about what it really means to create music. If a human types a keyword that generates a song, how much credit should the human get? What if the human plays a guitar riff, asks the software to turn that riff into a song, and then keeps using Suno to tweak and retweak the output? Nguyen replied to her critics by saying that the “misconception here is that ‘there’s no effort put in by a human,’ when so many musicians I know using Suno are pouring hours and hours into music production and creation.”

In practice, however, AI is helping even established musicians work less, or at least to work faster. The Verge reported this month that the technology has become ubiquitous in the country-music world, where Nashville pros are using it to flesh out demos and write melodies. The producer Jacob Durrett said in that story that Suno affords him “a productivity boost more than a creative boost”; the publisher Eric Olson said that it allows him to spend more time with his kids. Similar practices are happening in other genres. The Recording Academy’s CEO, Harvey Mason Jr., recently said many of the producers and songwriters he knows are using AI in some capacity.

While the technology quietly reshapes the industry, the first-order effect of AI’s ease of use is simply the existence of more music—a lot more. Suno users generate 7 million new tracks a day, which every two weeks nets out to about as many songs as exist on Spotify. Most of those tracks are likely never heard by anyone. Still, the streaming service Deezer has disclosed that nearly a third of the music uploaded daily to its platform is AI-generated. Spotify has said that it will crack down on obvious slop and spam—but definitively detecting when AI has been used to make a song is hard, and only going to get harder.

I admit to feeling some sadistic curiosity about what a full fire hose of AI music, intersecting with streaming algorithms tuned to deliver to users exactly what they want to hear, might reveal about listening desires. Historically, popular art tends to progress by the logic of MAYA: “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable.” Hit songs are usually neither wholly original nor wholly derivative but rather some delectable combination of the two. At a glance, AI may seem incapable of newness because it’s trained to replicate music’s past; many of the breakout AI songs to date sound incredibly familiar. But other examples show that the technology can, perhaps accidentally, carve new pathways.

Those are not always good pathways—but they are ear-teasingly novel, the results of choices a person probably wouldn’t or couldn’t make on their own (again: creepy). In Bleeding Verse’s viral track “Only When It’s You,” the vocals have a scuzzy vibrato, almost like someone’s blowing bubbles into the mic; the post-chorus jumps to a whistle tone that’s less Mariah Carey and more steaming teapot. An even more harrowing example: Spalexma’s “We Are Charlie Kirk,” which has been sarcastically memed into infinity. The nu-metal tribute to the late right-wing activist is deeply catchy and sickeningly soppy, like Creed but a lot worse. If a real person had attempted to record it, I’m convinced that he would have fainted from embarrassment. The song is an example of the entropic abominations that might catch on should AI music continue unimpeded, at scale: Spalexma, an entity whose authors aren’t known, published about 280 songs in less than a year.

However, in a bit of a twist, the full slopocalypse may be held off for a bit. Recently, a number of lawsuits by major labels against AI companies have ended in settlements that dictate significant reforms. One service, Udio, is now obligated to become, according to Billboard, a “walled garden” whose contents cannot be widely distributed. A deal reached in November between Suno and Warner Music Group mandates that the platform retire its current model and replace it with one trained solely on licensed data. Users will be able to remix work from artists who have opted to participate in the system, and they will now need to pay a fee to download their creations.

These developments will not end AI music, but they may slightly rein in the creative and copyright free-for-all, at least temporarily. The music industry—for obvious reasons—wants to control AI tools, making it harder, or at least costlier, for amateurs to jump its gates. But the generative possibilities and consumer demand demonstrated in the brief history of AI music to date aren’t going to be forgotten. A cultural countermovement that emphasizes flesh-and-blood talent and craft seems inevitable—but so is a future for recorded music that grows more crowded and chaotic with each day. In that way, too, AI music is accelerating something very human: competition.

The Happiest Man in Music

2025-12-18T07:00:00-05:00

Zane Lowe, the most important music interviewer working today, kicked his sneakers up onto his couch cushions and began to cry.

For the previous two hours, I’d been asking the 52-year-old global creative director of Apple Music about problems facing the record industry: growing fears about AI; broad discontent with streaming pay rates; the ambient suspicion that music doesn’t matter as much as it used to. Lowe is famous for the high-energy earnestness he shows on his internet radio show, where he often rains intricately worded praise down on artists while tossing in a boom sound effect for punctuation. He’d answered my questions with that same jittery jolliness, but he seemed, eventually, to want to redirect the conversation—back to the power of music itself.

He picked up the remote control for his office speakers and cued up a song from the indie-folk artist Keaton Henson called “You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are.” The song’s lyrics tenderly address a long-lost lover, and the music builds from quiet guitar harmonics to a rustling crescendo. As we listened mostly in silence, Lowe laid back in his Peter Pan–green sweater, looking pained. “That’s the real stuff, man,” he said when the song was over, wiping tears from his eyes. “That’s the good shit. That’s why we do it!”

This emotional display helped answer the question I’d really been pondering: how a Gen X DJ and former rapper from New Zealand became the record industry’s favorite influencer. At a time when social media allows artists to whittle the promotional cycle down to a few Instagram posts and a Hot Ones appearance, Lowe reliably books press-shy A-listers—Taylor Swift, Thom Yorke, Tyler the Creator—for in-depth exchanges that circulate widely and define the narrative around major releases. These conversations tend to invert the ostensible purpose of celebrity interviews. Rather than serve the public’s curiosities, he said, he wants to serve artists—to give them “a place for them to learn a little bit more about themselves.”

That chummy ethos is everywhere in cultural media these days, especially across podcasting, but Lowe—who was known for his long-form chats with artists at BBC Radio 1 before he joined Apple Music upon its launch in 2015—helped popularize it. “He’s largely responsible for the new and relaxed way artists interview,” the pop singer Halsey told me in an email. “When broadcast radio was starting to decline and long before podcasts had taken over as the primary source of information sharing, there was Zane Lowe in a cozy sweater saying ‘I’m your friend, your fan, and I want you to tell me how you really feel.’” Though the conversations aren’t journalistic, they can be quite revealing about craft and the artist’s inner life. Sampha, a soft-spoken alternative-pop singer, marveled to me about the “never-ending tap of insight” coming out of Lowe. “There’s always substance behind what he’s saying—even if he’s speaking fast.”

Opinions among music listeners are more mixed. Many viewers rave about the kindness Lowe extends to their favorite artists. But to others, he’s a cheerleader for the stagnant, idolatrous record industry—someone who’d rather give a fluffy compliment than ask a pressing question. In a 2024 episode of the Pop Pantheon podcast, the critic DJ Louie XIV called Lowe a “sycophant” running the “pop-music equivalent of Fox News.” Louie’s producer, Russ Martin, added, “It is just frankly not believable that he likes every record and he likes every song on every record.”

I enjoy Lowe’s work more than that—he’s clearly smart and often amusing, and he cares a ton about the art form. Yet I, too, have wondered about his sincerity: What kind of music geek doesn’t harbor some critical opinions? But one colleague, the radio host Eddie Francis, told me Lowe refuses to speak ill of artists even when off mic, even jokingly. Another, the Apple executive Oliver Schusser, who oversees music, told me he couldn’t remember Lowe disliking anything while on the job—ever. His positivity is so committed that it almost feels rooted in fear, as though our musical era would look, without his boosting, quite sad.

Commercial radio in New Zealand—as in many places worldwide—used to be controlled by the government, which had determined that the public interest was best served by a diet of classical music and weather reports. In 1966, Lowe’s father, a young DJ, set out on a fishing boat with five friends in order to break that monopoly. Three miles off the coast of Auckland, in international waters, the crew began broadcasting rock and roll to the mainland. The so-called pirate radio station was part of a global “fight for independence of taste and communication for a generation,” Lowe said.

But that exciting life in broadcasting meant Lowe’s father was gone for much of his childhood. His parents entered a prolonged separation when he was young, and Lowe coped by obsessing over songs and bands—so much that his own friends found it grating. He asked himself the question that, he said, he’s struggled with for decades: “Why does enthusiasm, a lot of support, translate as overenthusiasm, or annoying, or cringe, or just ingenuine?”

Lowe’s enthusiasm did prove helpful to his professional aspirations—both as a rapper and beat maker (who contributed to hits that are still considered classics of Kiwi hip-hop) and as a DJ climbing the ranks of music media locally and abroad. In the late ’90s, he moved to the United Kingdom and became an MTV presenter. By 2003, he was anchoring BBC Radio 1’s vaunted nightly pop segment, where he helped break acts such as Adele and Arctic Monkeys. His Radio 1 show “was the sound of a generation” in the U.K., Christopher Tubbs, a DJ and longtime friend of Lowe’s, told me. “Tastemaker doesn’t quite cover it.”

But soon, the idea of the tastemaker was being undermined. The launch of Spotify in 2008 meant that listeners could now hear almost anything they wanted on demand, guided by personalized recommendation algorithms. Lowe’s fame was rising because of headline-making interviews with Kanye West, Jay-Z, and other rappers, but radio’s salience was declining. When Apple began working on its own streaming service, Lowe joined a star-studded leadership team that also included the record producer Jimmy Iovine and Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor.

Apple had revolutionized music listening with iTunes and the iPod, but the company was late to streaming. Reputationally, the tech was a risk; Spotify’s rise had triggered complaints from artists who felt like the new system’s ease and cheapness devalued their art. “The idea that everyone would have the same jukebox in the sky, completely virtual, terrified some of us,” Schusser said. “Does it actually make music a little bit like, I don’t know, tap water?”

Apple’s answer to the perceived issues with streaming was to market itself as a prestigious, boutique alternative to Spotify. The two services are functionally identical in many ways, allowing users to explore mostly the same pool of music using mostly the same tools. But just as Apple TV has tried to compete with Netflix by funding highbrow dramas cast with movie stars, Apple Music has invested in signifiers of old-school quality—such as human-curated radio stations.

Ariel Fisher for The Atlantic

Zane Lowe at the Apple Music offices in Culver City, California, after recording a podcast episode

Sitting on the wraparound couch that circles the studio, I watched a parade of musicians come in and out all morning for two days in a row. The K-pop boy band Cortis arrived with an entourage of handlers and bopped around to their own music; the trance DJ Armin van Buuren got stony-serious on the topic of his new, piano-only album. Throughout all of Lowe’s platitudes and boosterism, my attention was rapt, and my mind never wandered. His continual gush of questions, compliments, and observations creates spectacle in the manner of a top-tier inspirational speaker.

Still, I wondered whom this spectacle was for. Lowe’s previous employers, MTV and Radio 1, were, at their height, essential hubs for anyone trying to plug into pop culture. Apple’s radio shows compete for ears with its streaming efforts, whose abundance has helped diminish the sense of a musical common ground. When I first started using Apple Music in 2015, I quickly forgot about its radio tab—other than when a clip of Lowe would cross my social feeds. His interviews tend to get views on YouTube in proportion with the popularity of the featured artists; as for the radio show itself, all that Lowe would say about its reach is that it was growing. “Any artist will tell you right now, the trick is trying to find an audience,” he said.

The reason it’s so tricky is, of course, streaming and the attention economy. Standing out is not just harder than ever—the stakes are higher than ever because, as Lowe put it, “there’s an imbalance in the financials” due to the small payouts per listen. “You can work at a company and be proud of the work we do and be a part of this current model—and still feel like there’s things that you wish were different,” Lowe said. “Two things can be true.” The comment drove home that I’d been watching a deliberate anachronism: an attempt to treat “tap water” as artisanal, and to feign monoculture at a company that had helped break it up.

Lowe, however, is without obvious precedent. Celebrity interviewers have always played a promotional role and gotten cozy with their subjects, but it’s hard to think of an era-defining interviewer who didn’t at least have some bite. Kurt Loder? Nineties rockers withered under his jaded stare. Ryan Seacrest? He’s got that Hollywood-slick, smiling-but-shady thing going on. Oprah? She’ll ask the questions people want to know the answers to.

The closest pioneer of Lowe’s method might be one who walked into the studio when I was there: the 68-year-old rock journalist and film director Cameron Crowe, who was promoting his memoir, The Uncool. “I think we’re both people pleasers,” Lowe said to him. “Would you agree?”

Crowe’s trajectory in rock journalism is a modern myth thanks to his 2000 movie, Almost Famous, which is based on the same memories that he writes about in The Uncool. In the early ’70s, at just 15 years old, Crowe started writing for Rolling Stone, which gave him the chance to interview artists such as Led Zeppelin, David Bowie, and the Allman Brothers Band. His role, he told Lowe, was to be a fan: “Take the journey with that artist. If they made an album that didn’t thrill you, don’t bail; stick with it.”

This approach clashed with other people’s ideals about the profession. The rock critic Lester Bangs once warned Crowe against becoming friends with the musicians he covers. “These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of rock stars,” he said, according to The Uncool. “And they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it, right?” He later added, “You should make your reputation on being honest, and unmerciful.” Bangs’s advice, repeated in Almost Famous, is a touchstone for music journalists—a reminder that being too gentle or generous can destroy the very thing you’re covering.

But Lowe has followed Crowe’s philosophy, not Bangs’s. He thanked Crowe for allowing “people like myself to be more comfortable in the fact that I don’t really have a particularly strong critical muscle.” Later, in his office, Lowe told me that although critique is important, it’s not the role he was “born to inhabit.” At base, he wants his interviews to be “a document for fans to cherish and watch over and over and over again.”

[Read: Hip-hop’s fiercest critic]

That goal neatly aligns with the record industry’s shifting prerogatives. Music consumption has largely cleaved into two patterns: the passive, casual streamer who lets the algorithm serve up good-enough background listening, and the ultra-invested “stan,” who builds a fiercely rooted group identity around their favorite artists. The new playbook for success isn’t trying to appeal broadly—it’s monetizing and remonetizing the attention of diehards.

Even so, I couldn’t help but think that he and Crowe held too rosy a view of what fans really want, especially nowadays. If you put a superfan in a room with their favorite artist, they aren’t only going to flatter and fawn. They’re going to pry for information, no matter how awkwardly. At a press conference Lady Gaga held with her fans this year, for example, the first inquiry was about a spicy topic: her relationship with the rapper and notorious troll Azealia Banks, whom she had beefed with in the past.

Lowe’s job, however, isn’t simply to follow his curiosities, as a fan might. “Just being really honest—we work as a business,” he said. Money isn’t exchanged in the booking of interviews, but certain artists may be priorities for Apple because of economic considerations, such as their potential for streaming success. “It’s not just like, you know, the Zane Lowe Show taste playground,” he said.

Artists can put preconditions on the interviews and “respectfully request that the conversation doesn’t stray into areas that might be considered a bit too sensitive,” Lowe said. “I don’t mind that. I want to know where their spirit is.” They and their representatives also, every so often, ask to give input on the final edit.

He gestured to my voice recorder while explaining why he complied with such requests. “As somebody who’s obsessive-compulsive, very aware of wanting to be thoughtful with my thoughtfulness, I personally have no problem giving any artist grace to be at their best,” he said. “And in doing so, the truth is, we get more because they trust us.” He added, “I’m not interviewing heads of state, right?”

Some of his subjects do, however, hold statesmanlike influence. Swift, for example, is so prominent that Donald Trump regularly takes potshots at her—a fact no interviewer brought up in her recent press appearances. Lowe told me he’d been allowed to ask whatever he wanted, but the topic just hadn’t occurred to him. “If I think about What am I going to ask an artist like Taylor Swift in 10 minutes?, I could set sail onto the Pacific Ocean in a rowboat and be very directionless, very fast,” he said. “That is a strong tide of overthinking.”

Additionally, no interviewers had asked her why she issued more than 30 different versions of her new album—a strategy that, by beckoning fans to buy multiple copies, allowed her to sell a record-shattering 4 million copies in one week. Many commentators have criticized her rollout method as wasteful and exploitative, but Lowe saw it as a creative bid to do what musicians need to do right now: turn music into an event. He framed it as a win not only for Swift, but for the art form. “Isn’t it nice to be in 2025, to know there are new milestones, new things that music can achieve that it couldn’t before?” he said. “Because the other option is backwards.”

One part of his interview with her had broken ground, however. Lowe asked—amid a blizzard of rhetoric about the importance of human connection—how Swift had been processing the public reaction to The Life of a Showgirl. “The rule of show business is: If it’s the first week of my album release and you are saying either my name or my album title, you’re helping,” she replied. She added, later, “I have a lot of respect for people’s subjective opinions on art. I’m not the art police.” These quotes ricocheted around the internet, taken as a sign that Swift was well aware of how many fans and critics had panned the album. Lowe hadn’t mentioned that mixed reception, but he hadn’t needed to. Celebrities can be as online as any of us—they know what their detractors think.

It’s this reality that Lowe and the new music-promo circuit try to guard against. The background hum of digital life is negativity, polarization, and jaded disengagement; the record industry craves a forum to pitch its narratives before they’re torn to shreds in comment sections and mined for TikTok drama. A healthier artistic ecosystem wouldn’t—and in the past, didn’t—need the “safe place” that Lowe professes to provide.

That ecosystem seems unlikely to grow healthier as technology progresses. AI-generated songs have recently begun flooding streaming services; Spotify listeners can call upon an artificial DJ to deliver banter and commentary tailor-made for the user. When I brought up AI to Lowe, it was the first time I heard him express open contempt. “Leave the arts alone, dude. Like, go and fix other shit,” he said. Regarding the prospect of an AI hitmaker, he asked: “By the way, how do I interview that person?” His voice had been growing louder, occasionally hitting a near-shout.

Minutes later, before grabbing the remote control to play Keaton Henson’s song, he clapped his hands and stared me straight in the eyes. “Music is magic,” he said. “It guides us and helps us in moments subconsciously and consciously all the time. It’s such an important part of being human. It’s such an important part of our experience that I think, without meaning to, we let it evaporate into everything.”

By this point, the authenticity of his idealism was hardly in doubt, but the anxious process required to maintain it was becoming clearer. I didn’t need to be told that music is magic; I’d never really questioned it. Then I remembered what he’d told me about interviews: They’re for the benefit of the subject.

The 10 Best Albums of 2025

2025-12-12T09:00:00-05:00

Editor’s Note: Find all of The Atlantic’s “Best of 2025” coverage here.

So this is the future?

Judging by mainstream music in 2025, humankind is not in a particularly creative place. The year’s main storylines included the rise of AI slop and cartoon K-pop. A number of once-lively hitmakers churned out forgettable product. The most-streamed tracks came out in previous years; the songs of the summer sounded like winter.

An escape from the malaise was simple: listening more broadly for new music. The best albums of this year were strange and personal. Artists tunneled in idiosyncratic directions, invented their own grammar, and told stories only they could tell. Whether they used stately cellos or dubstep wubwubs, they regarded technology not only as a tool but as an inspiration, a co-creator, one that opens certain creative paths and discourages others. Though we may be on the cusp of a major shift in how music is made, achieving excellent results will always require a thoughtful approach to the methods.

Apologies to FKA Twigs, Audrey Hobert, Wednesday, Playboi Carti, Olivia Dean, Bad Bunny, Erika de Casier, CMAT, Deftones, and Addison Rae—you also kept me, to quote the year’s best pop song, headphones-on.

10. Model/Actriz, Pirouette

The antisocial rage of punk rock sometimes flows from an embarrassing source: jealousy of the beautiful people. The Brooklyn foursome of Model/Actriz confesses to this secret on an album that captures the tricky relationship between individuality and voyeurism. In brooding spoken word, Cole Haden portrays his identity as vampiric, fueled by his obsessions—both intimate and parasocial—with others. Spidery guitars and pistoning rhythms from his super-tight band help infuse the mosh pit with the suspense of Rear Window.

Listen to: “Cinderella”

9. Clipse, Let God Sort Em Out

The internet-era rap pioneers Pusha T, age 48, and his brother, Malice, 53, reunited after a 16-year hiatus to deliver an album that, blessedly, shows their ages. The cool ruthlessness of their earlier years has ripened into fine crotchetiness; in compact, barbed verses, they mourn shared tragedy, kvetch about the content creators who’ve taken over hip-hop, and flaunt their capital portfolios (a new flex: “Now I’m 10 times the E.B.I.T.D.A.”). The queasy chords and off-kilter momentum of Pharrell’s beats suit two masters looking down from their perch, sickened by what they see.

Listen to: “So Be It”

8. Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band, New Threats From the Soul

Country music is booming because the genre’s central riddle—why the good times can’t just stay good—feels urgent in periods of change. The 40-year-old singer Ryan Davis, a cowboy wiseacre with a drum machine and the patience for 11-minute anthems, riffs merrily on such existential mysteries. You could spend a lifetime contemplating the crooked poetry of this rollicking album only to accept that, as Davis sings, time is not your friend or foe but “more like one of the guys from work.”

Listen to: “New Threats From the Soul”

7. Anna von Hausswolff, Iconoclasts

Some of the hardest rock and roll of the year came from … a pipe organist? This 39-year-old Swede sings with the gusty verve of Stevie Nicks or Kate Bush, and her arrangements simmer and explode with sax, guitar, and what can only be described as war drums. Released on Halloween, the album first scans as a spooky mood piece, but if you tune in to the lyrics about psychological collapse and world-weary grief, the heaviness becomes crushing.

Listen to: “Struggle With the Beast”

6. Lily Allen, West End Girl

To know one’s mind and communicate its contents clearly is a sign of enlightenment—and for that reason, if few others, the 40-year-old British singer Lily Allen should feel at peace. West End Girl narrates a scandalous divorce tale shaped by celebrity, nonmonogamy, and sex toys. Her deadpan delivery and gliding melodies land the plot twists crisply; the beats melt dancehall and soul elements into a drooping, numbed dreamscape. The rock-solid union of metanarrative and musicality gives Allen the security to share destabilizing emotions with wild candor.

Listen to: “Pussy Palace”

5. Dijon, Baby

The first track of this album celebrates the birth of a baby—and then comes the second track, titled “Another Baby!” The way that life unfolds in herky-jerky, unpredictable rhythms informs the experimental approach that Dijon, a 33-year-old producer-singer, takes to R&B. Hints of New Jack Swing, Prince, and Frank Ocean align and realign like slot-machine symbols, and Dijon’s voice dissolves into particles or stacks into choirs. The warm songwriting steadily points in the only direction we ever really get to go: forward.

Listen to: “Yamaha”

4. Geese, Getting Killed

If the 2010s were a decade in which the internet made American culture feel overlit and surveilled, the 2020s are more like an overgrown swamp, governed by murky forces and entanglements. Geese, a quartet of young rock virtuosos from Brooklyn, capture the vibe shift in freaky fidelity. As the band thrashes like a beast in a bag, Cameron Winter moans with rude confusion, as if he’s jarring loose from a barstool nap. He sounds like he’d have something to say, something important, if he could just think straight. But none of us can.

Listen to: “Long Island City Here I Come”

3. Rosalía, Lux

I would love to claim that I learned a lot from Rosalía’s tour through 13 languages and as many classical-music styles. The truth is that the flamenco-fusion artist undertook years of research and hired the London Symphony Orchestra not to teach—nor even, despite her saintly air, to preach. Rather, Lux connects on a strongly emotional, and catchy, level. Crying on the couch or humming on the street to her upward-arching trills, listeners need reckon with only one high concept: the power of music to move the soul, even if you have no idea how it’s doing so.

Listen to: “Reliquia”

2. Oklou, Choke Enough

Headphones are now so ubiquitous that they’re getting blamed for society’s ills—yet some albums still demonstrate how magical it can be to listen closely, and listen alone. The 32-year-old French singer-producer Marylou Vanina Mayniel deconstructs trance music as if with a jeweler’s chisel, making delicate dioramas that call to mind ruins covered in snow. Her voice is a glowing, childlike meep, and her tingling synths massage the inside of the listener’s skull. If you’re considering psychedelic therapy, maybe try this album first.

Listen to: “Choke Enough”

1. Ninajirachi, I Love My Computer

As the Baby Boomers aged, they sang about driving the Chevy to the levee; as Zoomers age, they’re going to nostalgize their screens. This seemingly dreary outcome can actually be life-affirming, insists the 26-year-old Australian dance artist Ninajirachi. She first caught my ear in 2021 with electronic pop that seemed crafted in her bedroom but was bolder, and more viewpoint-driven, than the work of studio pros. Now the cover of her coming-of-age concept album, I Love My Computer, portrays her where her generation seems coziest: amid devices, houseplants, and anime toys.

You needn’t have been a kid during the early-2010s reign of Skrillex and Avicii to be moved by the significance that EDM had on Ninajirachi’s cohort. On “iPod Touch,” she sings of stumbling upon a “song nobody knows” online and going to sleep with it pulsing from under her pillow. The synthetic claps and noisy basslines of her production evokes mega raves, but she’s singing—in a tone as sweet and liquid as cereal milk—about music’s ability to elevate normal life: “It sounds like first day, hallway, starting year eight / It sounds like beach day, heat wave, stoned and afraid.”

The monsters of the internet are here, too. The most chilling-thrilling listening moment of my year was first hearing “CSIRAC,” whose chipmunk-pitched chanting dramatizes a Siri-like entity playing pied piper to a curious child. On subsequent songs, Ninajirachi sings about the destruction of her innocence through sexting, and the trauma of coming across a beheading video. With haunted vocal multitracking and big, shuddering beats, the album builds to a climax in which hope and fear are swept into the same rush of human experience.

The aching warmth of this take on virtual life proved comforting this year. When an assassination video hit social-media feeds a few months ago, I worried that we’d crossed a Rubicon of desensitization from which the species will never recover. Meanwhile, art has been changing; AI allows anyone to whip up an album that sounds like this one—not as brilliant as this one, but like it—with a few clicks. We have to trust that as people engage with whatever new paradigm is emerging, they will still find old-fashioned meaning and transcendence. I Love My Computer is a reminder that as the world grows stranger, we’re all mostly the same behind our eyes.

Listen to: “iPod Touch”

The Coolest Girl on Earth Seeks God

2025-11-11T07:00:00-05:00

On the subway in Brooklyn the other day, I spotted yet another Gen Z person dressed in the predominant queer-chic style: a brown mesh top and baggy pants, with a tuft of tight and shiny curls, and a handbag lolling from their wrist. What caught my eye was their bag charm—a picture of Pope Francis.

Christianity is hot again, pundits have repeatedly declared throughout the 21st century, whether during the purity-ringed Bush years or Kanye West’s gospel reboot in the late 2010s. But signs of a true revival have been piling up lately. After years of decline, church attendance has leveled and might even be climbing. TikTok brims with “Christiancore” aesthetics and tradwives. An administration whose Millennial vice president converted to Catholicism just six years ago is pushing explicitly theological policy crusades. And the musical middle has gone megachurchy, filling the Billboard Hot 100 with country-tinged redemption tales and actual worship songs.

Now, Rosalía’s awe-inspiring new album harkens back to an older tradition of Christian art: the symphony written for the glory of God. Known for fusing traditional flamenco with experimental pop, the 33-year-old Catalan superstar has, for a while now, been the model of internet-enabled, cosmopolitan cool. Her smash 2022 album, Motomami, was a feast of earthly delights—reggaeton, hip-hop, hyperpop. But her fourth album, Lux, adopts the sound and ambitions of a classical oratorio to mirror the modern quest for salvation, in all its thrilling and frustrating contours.

Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and arranged with conservatory luminaries such as Caroline Shaw, Lux builds from strings, vocal choirs, and enough timpani to simulate a fracking expedition. Throughout, Rosalía continues her own tradition of pairing handclaps and melisma with bleeps and bangs. Employing 13 languages—including Catalan, Mandarin, and Ukrainian—she reinterprets historical tales of holy women, including Hildegard of Bingen, the monastic musical innovator of the 1110s, and Sun Bu’er, the Taoist poet who scarred her own face for her faith.

The undertaking, Rosalía has said, is meant to challenge dopamine-depleted listeners craving easy kicks. The truth, however, is that Lux might be her most broadly appealing effort yet. Though she’s often tagged as avant garde, Rosalía really is a mainstream fusionist, following the model of Beyoncé, West (now called Ye), and Frank Ocean. And classical music—especially as interpreted here—is hardly outré. She’s drawing from a canon more popular than pop music, the elemental material from which wedding processions and video-game scores are made. Even when Lux dips into regional styles such as fado or whips up computer-generated chaos, the album’s dynamic maneuvers—its crescendos, its denouements, its harmonic choices—skew familiar.

But the singing—Dios mío and holy shnikes, the singing. Flamenco has the unique ability to create operatic feelings on an intimate scale, and Rosalía has only further honed her instrument—plush and warm, with parchment edges—as she’s conquered arenas and headphones. She uses her voice as both emotional artillery and a conversational character, maintaining ferocity and nuance either way. On the slowly unfolding showstoppers, such as “Magnolias,” her refrains climb both up and out, as if she’s ascending to the heavens while giving a political speech. Catchier, more upbeat cuts like “Reliquia” bring her close to the mic, delivering each word with attitude, calling to mind a kid gossiping in the confessional.

[Read: The army of God comes out of the shadows]

Given the linguistic polyphony, even Spanish speakers will need to consult translations to understand her litanies. The gist is that she’s fretting about the heaven-versus-Earth dilemma, torn between “sparkles, doves, and saints” and “sex, violence, and tires” (she’s a certified jalopnik). Though the songs allegedly channel bygone saints, some of whom died for righteousness, she’s mostly telling contemporary tales of sacrifice, replete with references to bad boyfriends and AI girlfriends. Rosalía, like many of us, is asking herself what she’d be willing to give up to save her soul and thereby, in some small way, the world. Her autonomy? Her convenience? Her Jimmy Choos?

She’s probably not ready to do any of that, and the album ends with a compromise: “When God descends / I ascend / we’ll meet halfway.” The music, perhaps accordingly, sometimes languishes in a middle zone of wistful genre exercises. The pizzicato trembling of “Divinize” never quite shakes the feeling of indie twee; “La Yugular” plods a bit too long before locking into a fantastic, processional outro.

But the highs and lows, the moments when she considers going all the way into sin or salvation, explode out of the speakers and grip the gut. The lead single, “Berghain,” opens with violins whirling at helicopter speed while Rosalía plays a Wagnerian diva, sad and stuck. The storm slows and Björk—that goddess of truly confrontational pop—emerges to huff, offbeat, “This is divine intervention.” It’s the most terrifying moment on the album, and an example of the yet-more-daring Lux that Rosalía might have made.

Had she done that, though, she’d have risked leaving behind her congregants: an interconnected global generation looking for a meaning in the mess it’s inherited. In a cultural milieu in which cool now amounts to assembling the most cunning collage of references, Rosalía has given her stylish postmodernism a powerful bass note of purpose. The question of what we believe about our souls and what that belief demands is more serious than lifestyle fads or partisan politics allow for. Embracing the search, Rosalía preaches, can be as significant as having an answer.

Traditional Criticism Is in Trouble. Here’s What’s Replacing It.

2025-10-17T07:00:00-04:00

Illustrations by Pete Gamlen

Justin Tranter, a 45-year-old musician who has co-written smash hits by Chappell Roan and Justin Bieber, was annoyed. Social media, in Tranter’s view, had been overrun by music listeners (especially gay ones) acting a little too opinionated.

“What do we have to do to stop my fellow homosexuals from thinking that they are music critics just because they’re gay and have a phone?” Tranter asked on TikTok earlier this year. “You know nothing about a song. You know nothing about this industry. Just be a fan.”

The video—which Tranter later took down—seemed like yet another sign that the art of reviewing the arts was in a strange state. This year has been grim for criticism: The Associated Press stopped reviewing books; Vanity Fair winnowed its critical staff; The New York Times reassigned veteran critics to other jobs; and Chicago—the city of Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel—lost its only remaining full-time print-media movie reviewer when the Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips took a buyout.

A wave of recent essays has laid out the concerning implications of these developments. Social media, streaming algorithms, and AI are undermining the role that salaried experts once played. With the humanities and free speech under threat nationally, critical thinking itself can seem endangered. Pondering the things that entertain us—and what those things say about our world—requires a resource that’s in short supply: attention spans.

And yet demand for cultural commentary seems as high as it’s ever been. TikTok, Instagram, Substack, Letterboxd, and podcast apps teem with analyses of movies, books, Labubus—any cultural artifact you can think of. The music critic Anthony Fantano’s YouTube following (3.05 million) dwarfs Rolling Stone’s print subscription base (414,000 as of 2023). Even national politics now revolves around topics that would have been the provenance of cultural essayists: how to interpret a jeans ad, how to curate a museum.

As Tranter’s video reflected, the very platforms that are stealing eyes away from newspapers and magazines have created a new class of self-styled critics. With this transition, the definition of the profession is in flux. The credibility of traditional reviewers came from expertise, experience, and the imprimatur of trusted publications. Today, more and more critics pay their own bills, build their own followings, and invent their own rules. Recently, I’ve been reaching out to critics—new and old—to find out what those rules are. For better and for worse, the adage “Everyone’s a critic” no longer seems like an exaggeration.

One person who felt attacked by Tranter’s complaint was a former marketing professional living in Singapore who goes by the handle Swiftologist. The 28-year-old, whose real name is Zach Hourihane, has coiffed waves of hair and a winkingly imperious way of speaking; he’s amassed hundreds of thousands of subscribers since he began making YouTube videos, TikToks, and podcast episodes dissecting pop music about five years ago. He is that most modern species of music consumer: a Swiftie. And, as he argued in TikTok and YouTube responses to Tranter, he’s a real critic.

I watched those videos skeptically. As a writer who’s heard from more than a few outraged Taylor Swift stans over the years, I know how hostile to honesty that online fan tribes can be. But I was surprised to see Hourihane make a series of assertions that traditional critics would agree with.

Hourihane explained that critics matter because “they’re not dependent on labels or PR access to celebrities or artists”; he could have been paraphrasing the movie reviewer Pauline Kael’s observation that “the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.” When he pointed out that no set qualifications exist to be a critic, he was echoing the literary critic R. P. Blackmur’s 1935 argument that the job is “the formal discourse of an amateur.” When Hourihane said that he criticizes because he cares, I thought of what the music critic Jon Caramanica has said on the Times’ music podcast, Popcast: “Criticism is an act of love.”

Indeed, Hourihane’s work does have a critical bite—just rendered in pop-fan slang. In one video, he called Swift’s new album cover “chopped” (ugly) as he shared a broader theory about Swift’s shaky taste in visuals. His measured review of Sabrina Carpenter’s Man’s Best Friend built analysis out of sharp comparisons and contrasts. He praised Carpenter’s wittiness while noting that she “is not the universal songwriter. She’s not good at finding new ways to say things that have been felt before.”

Hourihane told me that he originally aspired to be a writer, not a YouTuber. He used to report for a news outlet in Singapore, and he said the written word afforded more “runway” to chew on an idea than video does. But much of his output includes meandering livestreams and “reaction” content, in which he records himself gasping and giggling as he listens to music in real time. He’d prefer, he said, to focus on thoughtful, prepared analysis. But audiences love reaction videos—his expression of horror at the sex puns on Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl earned millions of TikTok views. On social media, “if you make content for you and what you like, you’re doing it wrong,” he told me. “You need to make content for what people want to see.”

What’s surprising to me is that his audience of Swift diehards wants to be challenged sometimes. “People are really sick of the idea that if you have any sort of negative thing to say about an artist, it means that you hate them,” he said. The Swifties, in his view, are fundamentally just like anyone else: “Naturally we’re curious, we’re argumentative, we’re investigative thinkers. The algorithms don’t necessarily complement that, but I think people do want this even if they don’t realize it.”

In some ways, he’s doing an essential service for this cultural moment: piercing groupthink from the inside. In one video where he labeled Swift “the landfill queen” for wastefully pumping out merchandise, he lit into the “bootlickers” experiencing “Swiftie-brain-rot disease.” A commenter confessed to previously being one such bootlicker. “Zach, I appreciate you and all the work you put into this channel and keeping me grounded,” the commenter wrote. “Please keep it up, the girls need help.”

Critics now also have to cultivate their own fans. By steadily building a following over the years, Karsten Runquist, a 27-year-old aspiring director with an affable and unassuming demeanor, has become, by some measures, one of today’s most prominent movie reviewers. He’s the most popular user of Letterboxd, a site where people rank and review movies with their friends. On YouTube, he has hundreds of thousands of subscribers and earns a living through advertising income.

Runquist winced when we got to talking about how he defines a hobby that has become his job. “It feels disrespectful to call myself a critic,” he said over videochat. He barely passed English in high school, and when he began uploading movie analyses to YouTube back in 2017, he had not even seen any Paul Thomas Anderson films. He’s succeeded by evolving, in public, from newbie cinephile to expert—a journey he’s tracked by cataloging more than 2,000 movies on Letterboxd.

Letterboxd has broadly been credited with nurturing a new generation of movie buffs. Its 17 million users log the movies they watch and, if they want, attach a star rating or a write-up. It’s akin to online forums such as Goodreads (for books), Rate Your Music (albums and songs), and Beli (restaurants). These sites cut against the stereotypical image of a critic as an expert dispensing a thumbs-up or thumbs-down like a Roman emperor. Instead, criticism comes to feel just like bantering at a bar.

Runquist’s Letterboxd posts tend to amount to a few jokey words. His most “liked” review is of Everything Everywhere All at Once, which he gave four stars: “easily one of the top 5 movies about taxes” (the movie is partly set in an audit bureau). Though other reviews are slightly more involved, they all share a quippy, stream-of-consciousness, all-lowercase style representing “the first thing that comes to mind.”

Many of Runquist’s Letterboxd followers found him through YouTube, where his output includes both reviews and stuntlike projects (“I Watched 50+ Monkey Movies, Here’s What I Learned”). He’d initially been inspired by pioneering video channels such as Every Frame a Painting, which made carefully edited, thoroughly researched deep dives into the art of moviemaking. But as on Letterboxd, Runquist’s YouTube videos are conversational and shaggy. “I don’t think I take myself as seriously as a lot of other critics on YouTube,” he said. “I try not to act like I know more than my viewers.”

The performance of humility is a big part of what’s drawn people to him—but it also can undermine his authority. In a recent video, he panned the new Superman, saying, “There’s nothing that annoys me more than a movie for babies acting like it’s an edgy movie for adults.” Angry comments flooded in from superhero fans; more than 1,000 followers unsubscribed. A day later, Runquist posted another video apologizing for being “mean-spirited.” In the future, he told me, “maybe I will take into consideration the stan culture a bit more and go about things a bit lighter. Which is fine.”

This admission seemed sad—critics are supposed to take pride in withstanding disagreement. But when I watched his mea culpa, I felt some sympathy. Runquist regretted not what he said but how he said it—after all, he’d basically labeled the movie’s audience a bunch of babies. “I stand by my take obviously, but I think it was very much a learning experience of knowing you got to read the room as far as how you speak about things,” he told me. Experience might have saved him from this episode. But so might an editor.

Outside the realm of pop idols and superheroes, some young commentators are still performing the classic critical duty of digging into the obscure and underrated. A 28-year-old New Yorker named Margeaux Labat has built a brand for herself with calmly narrated TikTok videos, Instagram posts, and online-radio episodes directing her followers down eclectic wormholes—to yacht rock, post-punk, ambient music, and so on. Other critics have portrayed her as exemplary of the profession; the art-pop singer Caroline Polachek publicly raved that she’s “the future of music journalism.” But when we met up for coffee in Manhattan, I realized that the question of how to classify her job was more complex than it seemed.

Labat told me she thinks of herself as more of an “educational resource” than a critic. In 2019, she began posting written and filmed reviews of new albums on Instagram. With time, she moved from reviews to listlike recommendation videos laden with music-writer lingo—microgenres, fussy adjectives, esoteric references. Martyna Basta’s Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering was “like this foggy, ambiguous dream that you can’t stop thinking about”; she said Sluice’s Radial Gate “is on the more polished and intimate end of the alt-country spectrum, but if you’re into Appalachian folk and slowcore, you’ll love this.” Eventually, she began to focus more on interviews with artists, including celebrities such as Charli XCX and FKA Twigs.

Labat quit a job on the video team at Pitchfork last year, realizing that she could make a full-time living on her own. She accepts offers from music festivals to fly to them and make content; she’s done a number of overt promotions for brands, such as a video of British-music recommendations sponsored by Burberry. And sometimes, record labels offer to pay her to interview particular artists. She told me she says yes only if she really likes the music she’s spotlighting. “I’m prioritizing my integrity when it comes to my content,” she said. “What I choose to present to my audience is of the utmost importance. I don’t care how much money you’re throwing at me.”

[Read: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture?]

As we talked, it became clear that Labat would prefer it if she didn’t have to think like an entrepreneur. She’s mulled starting a newsletter or listening club. But that would mean putting more effort into emphasizing herself, as a personality, rather than emphasizing what she really cares about: music. “I never really see my social media as a way of building connection or forming community with people,” she said. “It’s just purely a means of self-expression for me.”

I asked whether she always disclosed her sponsorships so that audiences know who is paying her. “Um … it depends,” she said. “I can’t really think of the last time I did a paid interview that was outside of a festival context.”

At any traditional news organization, a journalist who accepts payment from a subject without telling the audience would be fired. But as essentially solo operators, content creators don’t get to maintain a strict fire wall between their business and editorial departments. Some of Runquist’s viewers once balked at him giving a sponsored shout-out to a movie; he’s been more careful with what money he accepts since then. Hourihane said that he has turned down a number of labels’ offers to pay him to endorse an artist without disclosing the deal. That he’d reject such deals testifies to an often-forgotten truth about the internet: When so many influencers’ influence is plainly bought and paid for, audiences come to crave voices that seem independent.

After my conversation with Labat, her manager said in an email that about 5 percent of her interviews have been paid. The manager wrote, “We would rather not give examples of which artists have paid and which have not, we just don’t want to bring their names into this piece without their approval.” She added, “We truly do not have all the answers on how to make this a long lasting and sustainable career. It’s a grey area, where press and marketing start morphing into the other.”

All of the commentators I spoke with are doing interesting work, and I could fill this article with many more examples of strong criticism outside traditional media. Even so, the more time I spent browsing new platforms, the more disillusioned I felt. For every second of insight a video essay provided, there were 10 more seconds of filler: platitudes, plot summary, sponsor shout-outs. TikTok’s algorithm started swamping me with humanities grad students of varying cogency. On Substack, I waded through lots of unedited disquisitions seemingly written during caffeine benders.

So I went to visit an institution: Pitchfork. In 2024, obituaries were being written for the 29-year-old music publication because its parent company, Condé Nast, announced that it was laying off staff and moving the site under the management of GQ. The funeral, which I participated in, was premature. Music fans remain obsessed with how the site rates their favorites, and artists have Pitchfork on their mind too. Recently, the rapper Offset reposted a forged screenshot claiming that he’d gotten the site’s coveted Best New Music distinction.

Pitchfork’s new editorial chief is Mano Sundaresan, a 28-year-old former NPR producer known for running the music blog No Bells. Under his reign, the site’s coverage has delved deeper into super-online rap and hyperpop. “I’ve been thinking less about just Gen Z as a unit and more just like, okay, these are the Gen Z people who are actually still interested in reading—and I think we can increase that number,” he told me as we sat in Condé Nast’s cafeteria in One World Trade Center.

[Read: Noisy, ugly, and addictive]

The broad fear when Pitchfork was subsumed into GQ was that a glossy fashion magazine’s coziness with the entertainment industry would be at odds with a music-reviewing site’s prerogative to trash bad albums. Thus far, though, Pitchfork hardly seems defanged. This year, a columnist called the pop singer Benson Boone “horrible, just godawful.” An album by the metal sensations Sleep Token received a 2.3 out of 10 and was deemed “sanitized pop-rap with all the sexed-up verve of Droopy the dog.” The flair with which these opinions were expressed made them into objects of discussion on TikTok and X. Clearly, music criticism can still go viral—which is one way to get people reading it.

Another way, Sundaresan said, is by making the site feel more “human” and less like a faceless institution. He wants what all of the young critics I spoke with have: a personal connection with their audience, rooted in the intimacy of social media. To that end, the site has continued pushing into video, including monthly clips that put critics on camera to talk about their favorite albums.

But, Sundaresan said, “the written word is still the most important way of thinking about music.” It has the potential for more “nuance and clarity” than a video does. Moreover, he said, “when you are trying to do music criticism as a YouTuber, you’re a YouTuber.” Performing for an audience means “you have to change the way you speak.”

None of the new critics I spoke with would likely disagree with that. Runquist has been studying written reviews; “You get better at film criticism by reading it, not watching videos,” he said. Hourihane complained about having to dumb down his content for people who don’t read: “It really does seem like people are genuinely getting stupider.” Labat was annoyed that she had to build a brand and be “at the mercy of the algorithm.” The shared ambivalence of all of these critics was telling. Successful though they all are, each of them feels constricted and compromised by their distribution platforms.

That’s not exactly a new issue, Michael Phillips, the longtime Chicago Tribune film reviewer who’d recently taken a buyout, reminded me.

For four decades—during which he also worked as a theater critic at a number of other papers—Phillips had four words pinned above his keyboard: be specific, be brave. The motto, he told me, reminded him of the point of his job. “The great ongoing challenge of critical writing,” he said, “is to chase the biggest, most complicated, and potentially most provocative ideas that a film, or a play, or book, or any work of art brings up.” Deadlines, however, can all too easily lure critics to hack out “generalities and bullshit”—and “that’s heartbreaking when that happens.”

Today’s new critics are trying to resist their own versions of those pressures. They clearly care about art and want to have serious conversations about it—and their audiences want the same, despite how easy it is to scroll away, engage shallowly, and let the market make one’s choices. But excellence and independence are all but impossible to consistently maintain without the steady backing of mentors or salaries, and when the incentives of the internet reward virality no matter how it’s achieved. The problem the profession faces is material, not spiritual. Culture still craves good criticism—someone just has to pay for it.

I expected that Phillips would seem a little glum when we spoke, a week after he’d taken his buyout. He said he was concerned that the winnowing of traditional-media critics was not a great sign for the country. “These times right now, in 2025, are just crying out for a diversity of strong voices to make sense of where we’re going,” Phillips told me.

But for the most part, he sounded buoyant. He talked with gratitude about the “ridiculous good luck” he’d had in a career path that “no longer exists.” And he was excited for what was next. That day, he had to catch a flight to attend the Venice Film Festival. He’d still be reviewing movies—but for a podcast, Filmspotting. “We can’t look back forever,” he said. “It’s too hard on the neck.”

Buy This Album. Now Buy It in Green.

2025-10-10T15:17:58-04:00

The news that Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl has recorded the biggest sales week for any album ever is an astonishing milestone in the annals of e-commerce. Swift’s fame ensured that the album would be a hit no matter what, but moving more than 3.5 million units in seven days required high-pressure sales techniques more common to mattress retailers than musicians. The feat testifies to one of the strangest aspects of modern music: the way that popularity has become part of the performance.

To understand what Swift achieved, it’s helpful to understand how Adele set the record Swift just broke. When her album 25 sold 3.38 million copies in 2015, the music industry was a different place than it is today. Spotify had come to America just four years earlier, and it was only beginning to qualitatively and quantitatively erode the value of music.

As streaming slowly became the public’s preferred way of listening to records, the medium complicated the traditional definition of success. An album having 100 plays could mean one person played it 100 times, or 100 people played it once. In either case, the artist is making a lot less money than they would from 100 album sales. In late 2014, the music industry started counting album equivalent units, a composite metric that accounts for streaming and sales. The term weights sales—physical and digital—far more heavily than it does streams.

Understanding that their business model was under threat, pop music’s titans initially balked at streaming. Swift withheld her catalog from Spotify from 2014 to 2017; Adele released 25 without making it available to stream at all for months. Unlike a lot of young pop stars, Adele had a multigenerational audience that included people who were still in the habit of buying albums. She followed up an inescapable breakout album (2011’s 21) with a monumental single, “Hello,” that sent a typhoon of hype through social media. The strategy worked. She smashed a sales record that ’NSync had set in 2000—which, hauntingly, was the height of the CD-sales era, right before file sharing brought the industry to a low.

As streaming then supplanted sales and stars such as Swift hammered out their issues with Spotify, a new playbook was written. Streaming encourages a volume game—the more songs on an album, the more streams it’s likely to notch. Streaming also makes repeat listening more important. Pop was always premised on replay value—but no matter how many times someone spun their CD of Bedtime Stories, Madonna received money only from the initial sale. In monetizing each listen, Spotify gave artists distinct incentives to cultivate fervent fan loyalty.

The streaming era coincides with the rise of “stans” for good reason. Listeners can now contribute to their favorite artist’s success by hitting “Play” and never “Pause.” The Billboard charts have accordingly leapt from being an insider-y topic to a subject of mainstream conversation akin to player stats in professional sports. K-pop fandoms circulate guides on how Billboard counts streams. When Cardi B and Nicki Minaj were recently feuding, they and their supporters waged war in part by comparing sales totals. Ed Sheeran has talked openly about thinking of his career in arithmetic terms. To be a fan of pop music already required appreciating a market-minded approach to art, but now it also means participating—simply by listening.

[Read: How did Taylor Swift convince the world that she’s relatable?]

Swift is the prime predator in this ecosystem. On the same day in 2024 that she released her 16-track album The Tortured Poets Department, she also released a 15-track bonus anthology. The payload of content was embraced by a sprawling fan base that was supercharged with excitement from the Eras Tour (the highest-grossing tour ever), and the album handily broke the record for the most streams in a debut week. But because its consumption skewed so heavily toward on-demand digital listening, it couldn’t beat Adele’s total-units sales record.

For The Life of a Showgirl, Swift and her team have taken advantage of an unexpected by-product of streaming: the elevated importance of traditional album sales. Vinyl has boomed in the past decade not because people necessarily want to listen to that format but because it gives listeners a tangible way to display their appreciation. Cassette and CD sales have bounced back a bit for similar reasons. Relatedly, music merchandise—tees and totes—has become a hot status symbol.

Showgirl turns an album release into something closer to the McDonald’s Monopoly contest, encouraging repeat purchases. The album exists in more than 30 “variants” so far: different combinations of listening formats, album art, merch, and bonus music. At Target—only at Target—you can buy The Life of a Showgirl: The Crowd Is Your King Edition (Summertime Spritz Pink Shimmer Vinyl), for $34.99. Online, you can order the So Glamorous Cabaret Edition CD featuring a show tunes-y take on the song “Elizabeth Taylor.” Different versions have different hand-signed photos; one edition comes with a cardigan; another has voice notes and a cover that tints the turquoise bathwater of the regular album image into a brownish orange.

Variants aren’t a new idea, but the sheer volume in this case appears to be unprecedented, and Swift has marketed them in a brazenly manipulative fashion. In the nearly two months between when the album was announced and when it was released, her website featured a number of mysterious countdown clocks. Invariably, they counted down to the announcement of an album variant—many of which were then available for a limited time only. Countdown clocks and flash sales are common features of online retailers that try to panic consumers into buying things they don’t need, and here Swift was acting in the spirit of Temu.

Listeners can, of course, resist these offers. But for many of Swift’s fans, ponying up must feel simultaneously pleasurable and obligatory—just like paying to attend Life of a Showgirl movie screenings that mostly consisted of lyric videos. On social media, some Swifties have been sharing photos of their hauls. It’s not yet clear how many variant editions have been sold, but if even a small percentage of Swift’s enormous fan base picked up more than one copy, she would have added a significant multiplier to her sales total.

What does this new record signify? Swift may well be more important today than Adele was a decade ago—but the comparison is apples to oranges because the cultural mainstream has fractured so dramatically since then. Swift is unlike her pop predecessors in the shape of her success: Rather than conquer the world with easy listening for a broad audience of casual listeners, she has inspired an intense, tribal devotion. The release of Showgirl—like those of Swift’s previous four original albums—was preceded by no singles, and you can stream the album for free. The people who are buying it are, plainly, making an investment based on extramusical reasons.

Which is not to say the music doesn’t matter; now that the album is out, it’s also breaking streaming records in ways that testify to her talent for making addictive pop. Showgirl is far less dazzling than advertised, but it remains a tight, 12-track album infused with the bubblegum witchcraft of the producers Max Martin and Shellback. A week after I reviewed it, I still feel that it’s her weakest effort to date—she’s previously rendered many of its ideas more cleverly, profoundly, ambitiously. Listening invites far too many thoughts about commerce winning over art.

Swift herself certainly seems to be thinking about money more than ever. Perhaps reflecting a cultural vibe shift back toward “greed is good,” Showgirl sees America’s favorite girl next-door flaunt her wealth lyrically, really for the first time. She mentions Gucci clothes, Cartier diamonds, and Parisian hotel stays. At first, “Wi$h Li$t” reads as an anti-materialist love song: Swift doesn’t crave “Balenci shades”; she just wants kids, love, and peace. But the joke implied by its title punctuation is that every dollar she earns is underwriting her own personal quest for happiness. This is Showgirl’s boldest achievement: disguising new bragging rights for a billionaire as a fairy-tale ending, and giving her fans a noble reason to spend.

Taylor Swift’s Fairy Tale Is Over

2025-10-03T10:43:49-04:00

She doesn’t sound like she’s having fun. She has the team captain, the cushion-cut diamond, the fans who will shell out for yet another branded cardigan—but Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl, and the life it seems to portray, is a charmless chore. Swift spends her 12th album pondering familiar bummers: rivalries, regrets, the countdown clock of her own mortality. What’s new, narratively, is her football-player fiancé and the happily ever after he represents. But she can’t quite convince herself, or the listener, that she’s getting what she’s always said she wants. She’s become too cynical to sell a fairy tale.

Theoretically this is an interesting place for Swift, that ever-striving Sagittarius, to be: at the end of a checklist of goals and still unsatisfied. Her economies-quaking Eras Tour flaunted the power earned by years of hard work; her engagement to Travis Kelce appeared to fulfill the romantic quest she has long sung about. Success certainly puts her under no obligation to fake a smile and hide her anxieties. Unfortunately, Showgirl is the sound of an overworked and overexposed entertainer reaching the mountaintop to find something worse than disappointment: burnout.

From the moment it was announced in August, Showgirl was sold as a bedazzled return to pure pop. Swift recorded it on tour, using free days to fly to Sweden to work with the legendary producer Max Martin and his collaborator Shellback. Their methods—ruthless melodic math, brazenly artificial production, and an odd soft spot for reggae rhythms—helped define the world-conquering sound of Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys. When Martin first teamed up with Swift for 2012’s Red, their partnership propelled her from country-music fame into the echelon of megastardom where she still resides.

Ever since 2019’s Lover, though, she’s preferred to work with indie-rock dudes (chiefly Jack Antonoff) who draw out her arty side. Her fascinating but unwieldy 2024 release, The Tortured Poets Department, seemed to push that phase of her career as far as it could go. That album prioritized emotional and narrative complexity over catchy sing-alongs. Showgirl, she said on her fiancé’s podcast, is a return to “melodies that are so infectious that you’re almost angry at it, and lyrics that are just as vivid but crisp and focused and completely intentional.”

The album sometimes does fit that description—especially on the relatively strong, if unexpectedly downcast, opening three songs. “The Fate of Ophelia” pairs delicate snares with an indelicate bass line as Swift raids Shakespeare to find a synonym for damsel in distress. Next, “Elizabeth Taylor” layers reverberating refrains for a smoldering, cinematic effect. (It has some solid scene-setting, too: “We hit the best booth at Musso & Frank’s / They say I’m bad news; I just say, ‘Thanks.’”) “Opalite” is an inspirational vocabulary lesson whose chorus is delivered with ’80s-rock pep worthy of Richard Simmons.

But the difference between effective and great pop is the ingredients missing here: novelty and passion. Swift and Martin’s previous highlights ambushed the ear with dubstep that crashed into country (“I Knew You Were Trouble”), satirical boom-bap (“Blank Space”), and industrial-R&B chaos (Reputation). A molten emotional core—an oh-so-Swedish mixture of glee and gloom—energized the exploration. Showgirl, however, sounds freeze-dried, prepacked, obvious. Though the album’s genres are superficially diverse—you’ll hear flashes of grunge, trap, and, yes, reggae—its arrangements could work fine as royalty-free background music for content creators. The Martin/Swift touchstone that’s most often recalled is the most simplistic one: “Bad Blood,” with its jock-jam drumbeat telling, not showing, the listener that they’re having fun.

[Read: The tortured poet of love gets engaged]

Swift’s songwriting isn’t pushing ahead either. Old tricks abound: perspectives switching between verses; high harmonies adding drama to a song’s final chorus. Lyrically, she tends to restate familiar themes in crasser terms than ever before. The ballad “Eldest Daughter” describes internet toxicity in the same way as an anti-bullying PSA: “Every joke’s just trolling and memes / Sad as it seems, apathy is hot.” And yet she’s very much the troll on “Actually Romantic,” which disses another singer with as much sophistication as “I am rubber, you are glue.” “Wood” salutes her man’s anatomy in a similarly third-grade manner. Album after album, she’s inched toward more explicit sex talk, but lines like “His love was the key that opened my thighs” are so uninspired—neither funny nor specific nor even memorably gross—that they feel nihilistic.

The most interesting thing about Showgirl is the way Swift cops to the all-too-palpable sense that she’s finding it hard to care about anything. “Honey” is a successful bit of self-therapy about why she’s weary of pet names. The George Michael–quoting “Father Figure” seems to revisit the hoary fable of her publishing rights in order to portray her as a cruel mob boss. On “Opalite” and “Elizabeth Taylor,” she tries to reconcile her excitement over a new relationship with her many, many memories of heartbreak.

The cover of the album—Swift glaring in what might be a post-concert ice bath—suits the hardened persona she presents here. And the music’s blend of moodiness and poppiness calls to mind 2022’s Midnights, which had more staying power than it initially appeared to possess. But that album was barbed with intrigue; it captured a journey inward, as Swift tried to figure out the source of her restlessness during a seemingly settled moment in her life. Showgirl, by contrast, doesn’t raise or answer questions. Well, other than: What’s the point of releasing an album whose music seems so exhausted and on guard?

Likely answers include money, obligation, and strategy. Charitably, she really needs us to know how enervating her past few years were. On “Wi$h Li$t,” she fantasizes about having kids and being left alone, and Showgirl leaves no mystery as to why she’d want to disappear. She does perform one unvarnished act of creative generosity with the title track, which closes the album. On it, Sabrina Carpenter—Swift’s favored protégé—lends a vocal performance whose warmth and playfulness cut like a beam through fog, offering a reminder of how pop is supposed to make you feel. Swift clearly doesn’t want to play the ever-grinning showgirl anymore. That’s valid, but so is the impulse to listen to anything else.

Finally, a New Idea in Rock and Roll

2025-09-26T11:20:50-04:00

Earlier this year, a new band called the Velvet Sundown released a song that sounded like it was made by a Benadryl-drowsed peer of the Eagles and Led Zeppelin. It earned more than 3 million streams, a rare feat for an unknown band. Except it wasn’t actually a band—it was (according to an official statement) a “synthetic music project” that had been composed and voiced using AI.

This development raised a sad question: Is rock and roll so stagnant that a bland computer imitation could do a better job than real groups?

The answer is no—young artists are still moving the genre forward in electrifying ways. Take Geese, a quartet of Brooklynites who were signed by a record label just after they graduated high school. Outlets such as The New York Times have since endorsed them, and one track from the solo album of the lead singer, Cameron Winter, became a TikTok hit, garnering more than 7 million Spotify plays. The band’s new release, Getting Killed, stages an intense and unpredictable melee between punk and free jazz. It’s the result of humans collaboratively making decisions that no one else would make, just because they feel like it—an album that seems capable of piercing through even the most serious cases of burnout and brain fog.

The members of Geese are part of the first generation of music nerds to be raised with streaming services at their disposal, which gives them something in common with AI: They’ve studied tons of old records and can raid all of them. Geese’s songs blend Frank Zappa–style zaniness, the simmering swagger of the Rolling Stones, the jumpy surrealism of Pixies, and many other influences. But no track on Getting Killed lacks for WTF is this? novelty. The rock references are like the acquaintances who populate your otherwise-baffling dream.

What first hooked me was the music’s strong waft of Radiohead. Though that’s one of the most overused comparisons in rock, in this case it’s warranted on both the sonic and spiritual levels. Like Thom Yorke, Winter sings in a way that calls to mind the tragic arc of a balloon deflating in midair. Both bands specialize in grooves that feel bulbous and fetid: kick drums gulping with fear, flickering guitars evoking lantern light. It’s the sound of a dangerous spelunking into the subconscious.

[Read: This is the band that’s supposedly saving rock and roll?]

But whereas Radiohead’s explorations lead to shivery-beautiful pop payoffs, Geese is more interested in rawk: momentum, drama, well-juxtaposed noise. Geese uses time signatures that you need a degree from Berklee to understand. It loves a jump scare. The panning, wah-wah guitars that open the album create a funky equilibrium that feels like it could go on forever—but the chorus smashes the arrangement into a wall. A trombone squawks, and Winter screams, over and over, “There’s a bomb in my car!”

What’s going on with this guy? On “Husbands,” Winter seems to warn against trying to interpret him: “I’ll repeat what I say / But I’ll never explain.” Nevertheless, the music and words add up to a recognizable character. Sometimes Winter sounds like Chewbacca doing opera. Sometimes his voice bifurcates into a falsetto and a burp, Exorcist-possession-style. While his band’s rhythms are humping and short, he likes to sing sustained, smearing notes. He sounds off-balance, groggy, and barely sane, like someone who’s stumbled onto the street after three days of doomscrolling.

This hint of meaning—which is really a search for meaning—coheres the music’s sprawl. On some songs, Winter chats with God and angels, seeking a cause to believe in. On others, he’s looking for commitment in a no-strings-attached universe. The astoundingly chaotic title track finds Winter complaining about not being able to hear himself speak over the blather of “everybody in the world.” In a bruised, majestic crescendo, he eventually confesses to “getting killed by a pretty good life.” He captures what it’s like to feel unfulfilled in a land of unlimited convenience and choice: weird and pathetic.

Geese isn’t the only one making disorienting music for disorienting times. It’s part of a wave of rock bands using itchy-scratchy rhythms and wild-eyed lyrics to express the frustration of having one’s own mind colonized by content (Black Midi, Model/Actriz, Wet Leg). Similar impulses course through other genres, like hyperpop. Even frenetic, stylistically unstable rappers such as Playboi Carti seem to be doing what Geese is doing: fighting fire with fire in the attention wars. “I think we’re just trying to match the world we live in, in terms of the feeling,” Winter told the newsletter Blackbird Spyplane. “I don’t think we’re really so interested in making music that’s an escape.”

Indeed: Geese listeners will sometimes be in need of escape from their own headphones. The band’s gee-whiz musicality and performative randomness can grate in the stretches of the album where Winter doesn’t seem sure of what he’s trying to convey (his lyrical fixation on certain words, like horse or pants, has the air of filler, or maybe a joke on the audience). Certain songwriting tricks—such as restarting a track midway through in a new tempo—are a bit repetitive. To become as great as its influences, Geese will need to further sharpen the ideas it has surfaced. In the meantime, it has achieved something miraculous for 2025: suggesting a future to look forward to.

David Letterman’s Jimmy Kimmel Reaction: ‘We All See Where This Is Going, Correct?’

2025-09-18T17:03:26-04:00

The 78-year-old comic legend David Letterman arrived onstage at The Atlantic Festival today carrying a list of presidents he’d mocked in his 33 years as the longest-running late-night comedy host in American history. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama—he’d made fun of them all (especially, he added with a chuckle, Clinton and Bush II).

“Beating up on these people, rightly or wrongly, accurately or perhaps inaccurately, in the name of comedy—not once were we squeezed by anyone from any governmental agency, let alone the dreaded FCC,” he said. He added, “The institution of the president of the United States ought to be bigger than a guy doing a talk show.”

Letterman was speaking with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg a day after ABC announced it was suspending Jimmy Kimmel Live “indefinitely”—a move that critics attributed to pressure from Brendan Carr, the Donald Trump–appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. The incident has ignited concerns over free speech and the willingness of media conglomerates to bow to government threats. “We all see where this is going, correct?” Letterman said. “It’s managed media. And it’s no good, it’s silly, it’s ridiculous, and you can’t go around firing somebody because you’re fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian—a criminal—administration in the Oval Office. That’s just not how this works.”

During his opening monologue on Monday night’s show, Kimmel said that America had “hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” Kimmel’s comment seemed to imply that Kirk’s alleged killer, the 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, is a MAGA supporter—an implication now contradicted by most available evidence. According to a charging document filed by police in Utah, where the shooting took place, Robinson’s mother said her son had “started to lean more to the left” over the past year, and his father said Robinson had criticized Kirk for “spreading hate.”

Frequently, when entertainers say something untrue and inflammatory on camera, they issue a correction, apologize, and move on. But Kimmel’s statement arrived amid grief and outrage about Kirk’s death and the perception that many on the left were cheering it. Yesterday, on the conservative podcast hosted by Benny Johnson, Carr spoke critically of Kimmel and said that networks “have a license, granted by us at the FCC, that comes with it an obligation to operate in the public interest.” He added, “Frankly, when you see stuff like this—I mean, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” After Carr’s comments, Sinclair and Nexstar, companies that operate dozens of ABC’s affiliate stations, quickly announced that they were pulling Kimmel’s show for the foreseeable future. Disney, ABC’s parent company, soon after declared it would follow suit.

As Letterman pointed out onstage, the “easy way or the hard way” verbiage had the ring of Mafia language. “Who is hiring these goons?” he asked. “Mario Puzo?”

Letterman said Kimmel had texted him that morning: “He’s sitting up in bed, taking nourishment. He’s going to be fine.” But he was concerned about the implications for the comedy world more broadly. Trump posted last night that ABC’s decision was “Great News for America” and called upon NBC to banish late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, “two total losers.” Kimmel’s suspension came just two months after CBS announced that The Late Show With Stephen Colbert would end next year with no planned replacement. The network attributed the decision to financial motives, but Letterman instead saw political motives at play, given Colbert’s history of criticizing Trump. “That was rude,” he said. “That was inexcusable. The man deserves a great deal of credit.”

(As for Fallon, Goldberg suggested in his interview with Letterman that he was a less “sharp-tongued” critic of Trump than other late-night hosts. Letterman shot back, “Why do you think that is? Has something to do with IQ, is that what you’re saying?”)

In the years before Trump ran for political office, he was a frequent guest on Letterman’s Late Night, but the host retired from the gig in 2015. (“Ten years ago, I was smart enough to cancel myself,” he cracked at the festival.) Now Letterman is as loud a critic as any of the Trump administration. “This is misery,” he said onstage. In a “dictatorship,” he said, “sooner or later, everyone is going to be touched.”

A New and Dangerous Kind of Fame

2025-09-15T13:06:18-04:00

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The defining art form of our times might be the reaction video. You’ve surely seen a few: some influencer gasping, or screaming, or doing bug eyes as they take in a much-hyped new song or a movie’s big twist. The point is to bottle unpredictable, sizzling human emotion into rewatchable content. Scrolling on one’s phone can be a deadening experience, but here’s someone feeling, or at least pretending to feel, a genuine feeling—even if the abundance of these videos surely numbs us further.

Last week, a video of Hasan Piker reacting to the sight of Charlie Kirk getting shot during a discussion at Utah Valley University on Wednesday quickly accumulated millions of views. It was unwittingly made: Piker, a leftist commentator and video-game influencer, was broadcasting live on the streaming platform Twitch on Wednesday, browsing around the internet in an attempt to nail down the truth of what had happened. In an automatic-thinking patter, he said, “There’s a closer footage of Charlie Kirk getting shot in the neck here as well where you can clear—” and here he recoiled as the video played out of sight from the audience—“Ohhhh, he’s dead. Oh my God, he’s definitely dead. Oh my God. I can’t believe I just saw that.”

A string of pearl-like beads peeked out from beneath Piker’s midnight-blue collar; he took his thick glasses off his face and rubbed his eyes. His backdrop was a colorful tableau of posters, a neon sign, and a dozing dog. He looked the part of a hot celebrity living a comfortable and fun life in Los Angeles. Yet he was processing, in real time, a gory murder that held personal implications. Kirk was his peer in an ascendant content-creator class now under mortal threat from the very culture it helped shape.

Kirk was a political operator, a campus organizer, and a close confidant of Donald Trump—but to many people who knew of him, he functioned as an entertainer. Whether at in-person debates or on podcasts and YouTube, he cut through the gray sameness of political commentary with boyish and bouncy verve. His activist group Turning Point USA helped update the young-Republican aesthetic, swapping bow ties for T-shirts and making rallies feel like rock concerts. Last year, his Jubilee Media debate video went mega-viral in part because of its cinematic value: Kirk delivered explosive opinions with a twinkle and a shrug, absorbing the repulsion of his opponents without dropping his upright posture and cheery grin.

If Kirk was an influencer, his influence was not just what he said but how he said it—and the way that style served to draw more people into politics. He made debate look cute and sporty and admirable, like a game anyone could play. On Wednesday in Utah, Kirk was in his typical folksy-performer mode, sparring with college students while wearing a white T-shirt under a tent that said PROVE ME WRONG. It looked like he was having fun, right up until the moment when he was shot.

In some ways, Piker is his closest counterpart on the left. He’s not nearly as enmeshed in his political party’s institutions as Kirk was, but since last year’s presidential election, the 34-year-old Piker has received heaps of mainstream-media attention for possibly being an answer to Democrats’ inability to connect with young men: He’s a jacked, funny bro who loves Elden Ring and universal health care. But he’s been in the discursive arena for about a decade now. “Charlie Kirk and myself gained prominence in American politics at about the same time,” he said on the stream, pointing out that he’d debated Kirk multiple times over the years. They were set to debate each other again later this month at Dartmouth, on the topic of “the politics of youth.”

I tuned in to Piker’s livestream on Wednesday shortly after news of the shooting broke. He was doing his typical streamer duties—clicking between news footage and social posts, offering bursts of monologued commentary. But he was clearly shaken; he sighed, and fell into silence again and again. “I go out to public settings like this all the time,” he said, referring to Kirk’s event. “There’s a level of closeness in that regard because of the nature of what I do.” At one point, his phone lit up with a notification. Someone had left a comment on YouTube saying it should have been Piker who was killed.

[Read: Something is very wrong online]

His chat room—a continual stream of comments from fans—expressed a range of reactions to Kirk’s death. Some viewers urged Piker to take a day off, to get security, to condemn the shooting (he did, calling it “unacceptable” and “abhorrent”). Some said that Kirk deserved what he got, which incensed Piker. “You guys are saying things right now that is completely fucking ridiculous,” he said. “You’re saying things without even assuming how it reflects on yourself, how it reflects on the left, how it reflects on people like myself—deliberately putting someone like myself in the fucking crosshairs, in the line of fire. There is never going to be a moment where I will ever advocate for fucking political violence of this sort.”

That last statement will sound rich to any critic of Piker’s. This year, he was temporarily suspended from Twitch for saying that Republicans who care about Medicare fraud should “kill” Rick Scott; in 2019, he caused outrage when he said that the United States “deserved” 9/11. In his telling, these were overheated and “inappropriate” word choices that distracted from the points he was trying to make. (The 9/11 comment—a claim that U.S. foreign policy had motivated the terror attacks—resurfaced last week in the New York City mayoral race when Andrew Cuomo attacked Zohran Mamdani for his association with Piker.) But Piker, like many other streamers, is accustomed to speaking glibly about serious matters. In his stream on Wednesday, as GOP figures began calling for righteous “war” on the left, he seemed to be contemplating the impact that careless rhetoric can have.

Using lingo native to his audience, he explained the self-defeating logic of political violence. Kirk’s death would likely inspire “adventurists” to go on “vengeance quests” (or: inspire hotheads to take revenge). He talked about how it would be used to feed the political meta-narrative in ways that benefited the right, giving it pretext for “insane shit.” His interest in deescalation seemed earnest and pleading. But Piker was speaking of politics as it is so often spoken of now: as a game. He didn’t seem to be trying to pull his audience back from a view of the world that thinks in terms of wins and losses, and that turns the other side into non-player characters whose lives don’t matter. He was mostly just warning that certain tactics would make liberals and leftists lose.

Since the shooting, Piker has modeled a different tactic: using the attention he’s receiving to amplify his own side’s worldview. In a New York Times column, he wrote that America’s rapacious capitalism, support for international wars, and lack of gun control created the conditions for what happened in Utah. This confluence of factors, he argued, builds resentment and a taste for violence, eventually affecting “the way many of my viewers—and many of the people who followed Mr. Kirk—see the world.” Left unsaid in the article is that what unifies his and Kirk’s viewers is not just the country they live in but also the media ecosystem in which they participate.

To be a public figure is to be at risk, and both political leaders and entertainers have long been subjected to threats, stalking, and even assassinations by unwell people who have developed an obsession with them from afar. The means by which that kind of obsession can be cultivated are more potent than ever, and many of today’s most influential public figures foster a sense of accessibility, and intimacy, that would be unthinkable for previous generations. If we are, as is frequently said, living in an era of extraordinary political violence, it cannot be understood as separate from the rising cultural hunger to reach out and touch—or do much worse to—the people on our screens.

But part of Kirk’s importance was that he was not merely a figure on a screen—he built power in real life, insisting on face-to-face dialogue, using the format of adversarial debate to challenge online echo chambers. His death may have a chilling effect on similar efforts, pushing politics even further into the virtual realm, creating more radicalism and dehumanization. Piker noted that his “IRL” efforts seem newly risky: “I have a policy of not living in fear. But we’ll see. I might have to reconfigure certain things.” On Friday, the inscriptions on the bullets found with the gun that killed Kirk were revealed. They included an up arrow followed by a right arrow and then three down arrows—a button combination that, in one video game, drops a bomb on your opponent.

How Did Taylor Swift Convince the World That She’s Relatable?

2025-09-04T07:00:00-04:00

A great way to ruin a party is to put on a Taylor Swift playlist. The Swift fans in the crowd will stop what they’re doing to sing along, but pretty soon the non-Swifties will start to complain—about the breathy and effortful singing, or some fussily worded lyrics, or the general vibe of lovelorn sentimentality cut with dorky humor (“This. Sick. Beat!”). You’ll soon find yourself hosting another round in the endless debate about whether Taylor Swift is a visionary artist or merely a slick product of marketing. Both camps will be reacting to the defining feature of Swift’s music: There’s just so much of her in it.

Pop isn’t supposed to work this way. The most consequential American singer of the past 20 years, Swift can claim commercial achievements that equal or surpass those of the Beatles, Madonna, and Michael Jackson. But Swift still has the feel of an acquired taste, albeit one that millions have acquired. Her success owes less to smash singles—though she has them—than to the obsessive listening she elicits from fans. She is the perfect entertainer for our socially fractured era, in which internet-forged tribes—led by charismatic, love-’em-or-hate-’em idols—have upended politics and popular culture.

Why her? What is the essence of Swiftness? Taylor’s Version: The Poetic and Musical Genius of Taylor Swift, by Stephanie Burt, is a thorough and thoughtful elaboration of the conventional answer. An influential poet and a Harvard professor, she made headlines for teaching an English course called “Taylor Swift and Her World” last year. Burt writes in a sober, ruminative fashion that departs from the overheated tone of so much Swift-related commentary. Rather than limit her comparisons to contemporary pop stars, she puts Swift in conversation with writers such as Alexander Pope and Willa Cather. Still, the book ultimately reinforces the consensus among critics, fans, and even haters that Swift’s extraordinary success stems from how ordinary she seems—a consensus that both underplays her achievement and insulates her from critique.

[Stephanie Burt: Taylor Swift at Harvard]

Burt knows that the subtitle of her book contains a major claim, and she addresses it early and directly. The genius label is “more often applied to artistic revolutionaries, to rule-breakers who stand above and apart from the crowd, and (not by coincidence) to men,” she writes. They tend to follow Ezra Pound’s famous dictate to “make it new,” leaving an entire discipline transformed. But Swift, as Burt sees her, isn’t that kind of genius. She is “a versatile creator who understands her audiences; who brings us along with her; who figures out all the rules, then uses those rules.” Burt goes through Swift’s catalog album by album, showing how every phase hews to what she sees as the three pillars of Swift’s brilliance: her songwriting acumen, her work ethic, and her relatability.

That last term, relatability, is the watchword of almost all Swiftology—understandably enough. The tidiest explanation for Swift’s success is that she befriended an audience the music industry had underestimated: girls and young women. Swift’s 2006 self-titled debut (released when she was 16) and subsequent two albums of country-pop embodied the point of view of a teen navigating first crushes and schoolyard rivalries. “Fifteen” mentioned Swift’s friend losing her virginity; “The Best Day” was inspired by being shunned by the popular girls. These topics were the concerns of neither the Billboard Hot 100 nor mainstream country at the time. In a 2009 interview, Swift explained, “All the songs I heard on the radio were about marriage and kids and settling down. I just couldn’t relate to that.” The inner lives of girls are so often treated as trivial—but Swift’s hopeful voice and assertive melodies conveyed confidence that her, and her audience’s, experiences were as important as anyone else’s.

As Swift matured from teenage newcomer to name-brand celebrity, she managed to sing about her personal dramas—her trysts with actors, her feud with Kim Kardashian—in ways that sounded recognizable to ordinary young women. “Dear John,” from 2010, was clearly a kiss-off to her ex John Mayer, the rocker who met Swift when she was 19 and he was 31. But Swift’s narrator was simply “the girl in the dress” who “cried the whole way home”—an archetype that many listeners could see themselves in. Swift’s dismay about a powerful ex became a fable for any girl courted by an older guy. “When Swift sings about men, especially bad men,” Burt writes, “she’s often singing to, and for, other women, and she’s usually giving advice.”

Swift’s sisterly relationship with her audience is only part of her role-model appeal. Her songs portray her as a specific sympathetic type: the good, hardworking girl straining to exceed personal and social expectations, all while caddish guys and jealous rivals do her wrong. Pop culture loves to valorize underdogs, and Swift’s trick has been making the figure of the “careful daughter” (to quote “Mine”) into one. She’s a “people-pleaser, driven both by her wish to follow the rules and by her own persistent artistic ambition,” Burt writes. “But that ambition also leaves her vulnerable. What if she fails? What if people think she’s fake?” To anyone with a hint of a pleaser in them, those questions will remain poignant no matter how little Swift’s life resembles their own—as concert crowds who dress up in Swift’s image readily attest.

[Read: Taylor Swift’s adulthood blues]

But relatability can also be a reductive, even belittling lens through which to view any artist’s work. It downplays the exceptional qualities of an entertainer—magnetism, talent, unpredictability—as well as the curiosity and flat-out awe that draw audiences to them. Swift skeptics tout the relatability thesis when they say that she’s done nothing original other than identify an eager audience to exploit. And the logic of She’s just like us renders even the claim of Burt’s subtitle as faint praise. Swift, in Burt’s view, has merely tinkered with a formula. She’s used her songwriting acumen and work ethic to model a feminine sort of genius, in which fastidious care—not disruptive innovation—creates a body of nourishing art. In this interpretation, her achievements should be attainable for anyone who puts their mind to it. Really, though, Swift has done precisely what Pound commanded. She’s made pop music into something new.

These days, every influencer and brand consultant seems to want to call themselves a storyteller. It’s a 21st-century buzzword, perhaps because narrative—the open-ended, mythic kind sustained across Marvel movies and the MAGA movement—has turned out to be one of the few ways to capture and hold attention in a distractible, content-flooded culture. And yet many familiar narrative forms—stand-alone books, movies, concept albums—can hardly compete anymore. Swift’s greatest legacy is already clear: overhauling pop into a vital, contemporary storytelling medium.

Music has always had narrative aspects: Lyrics can tell stories, and the pleasure of a chord progression is in the movement from beginning to middle to end. But music is also an art form of pure sensation whose power surpasses words. For pop music in particular, narrative can be fundamentally in tension with other imperatives. The more plot, specificity, and complication in a song, historically, the less likely it is to work as a sing-along for everyone.

Great artists have transcended this contradiction. Joni Mitchell’s and Bruce Springsteen’s hits, for example, are simultaneously tuneful and rich with story. The work of both artists is among the many precedents for what Swift has accomplished. But their catalogs are also filled with music that skews away from pop palatability in order to tell woollier tales. They have songs of sharp political observation, something Swift’s only clumsily stab at, and songs describing abstract ideas in abstract ways, which Swift’s concrete style and first-person vantage tend to preclude. (Mitchell’s song “Blue” is a riddle of ambiguous images and phrases; Swift’s “Red” opens, “Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street.”) And neither Mitchell nor Springsteen enjoyed a sustained duration of chart success on the scale that Swift has. Her commercial echelon, again, is more akin to pure pop artists like Madonna, whose lyrical narratives—while memorable—aren’t usually packed with diaristic detail.

Swift’s breakthrough has been finding ways to saturate sugary tunes with information. Whether banger or ballad, her tracks make room for characters, settings, twists, a tidy ending, a cliff-hanger. The tracks interlock with other tracks—and with extramusical artifacts, headlines, and rumors—to build a larger story that makes each individual work more enjoyable. (For example, the 2022 song “Question … ?,” describing a mysterious kiss at a crowded party, is deepened by piecing together how this kiss ripples over years of Swift’s life—and through the rest of her catalog.) Listening to a Swift song is like eating a candy bar that transmits a personal essay into your memory. If you eat enough candy bars, it becomes a novel, and then a series of novels, and then (this is when you become a Swiftie) a virtual-reality, open-world video game you play with friends and strangers. If that all sounds nonsensical, it’s because Swift has pulled off something that’s never quite been done before. The closest comparison might be to show tunes—but for a one-woman play that’s gone 19 years without a curtain call.

How does she do it? Burt is helpful here. “Every sound and word in almost every Taylor song not only solicits attention but rewards it,” she writes. “Time that we spend on her work won’t feel wasted or pointless.” Swift’s moment-by-moment choices play on both the listener’s ear and intellect. She works to turn the audience’s brain on rather than—as pop often seeks to do—off. But the truth is (and this is an actual sign of genius), there’s no single, simple answer to the how of Swift. With every song, her skills meet her assignment in a new way.

Take “All Too Well,” Swift’s best track by wide acclamation. The original 2012 version is a five-minute strummed reminiscence that was never released as a single; the now-canonical version, released in 2021, is 10 minutes long. No song of this length had ever, as this one did, hit No. 1 on the Hot 100. And perhaps no song of this length has ever been so compulsively listenable. Within that form of distended pop song—verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, instrumental passage, outro—she does riveting work with music and lyrics. Burt digs into the poetics:

The song amounts to a masterpiece not just in how images move within the restricted space of a pop song, but also in rhyme and off-rhyme and consonance. “Gaze,” “upstate,” “place,” and “days” shift as if each word sought, but couldn’t quite settle into, its perfect rhyme. “Asked for too much” chimes with “tore it all up”; “break me like a promise” matches “name of being honest” (notice the t’s in the first pair, the b’s in the second).

She observes that “these devices might come off as not much more than basic competence in hip-hop, where rapid off-rhymes across lines are what we expect. In Taylor’s kind of pop song, though, where everything has to fit a melody, and verse-chorus patterns aren’t optional, it’s bravura technique.”

Burt’s allusion to hip-hop hints at another way in which Swift breaks ground: As her career has progressed, Swift’s adventuresome approach to genre has helped her write ever richer chapters. Country music, that classic stronghold for story-songs, was a smart place for her to begin her career. (Intentionally so—at age 13, she moved from the Pennsylvania suburbs to Nashville, where she adopted a twang.) When she began to turn away from country, with 2012’s Red, she embraced electronic-dance-music elements—not simply as trendy tropes, but as punctuation marks in the musical stories she was telling about her giddy, exploratory 20s. The results were jolting and sui generis. One struggles to think of any precedent on the charts for a song like “I Knew You Were Trouble,” in which chipper surf-rock verses careen into headbangable choruses of synth-fortified wailing—signifying the moment when she realizes how ill-advised her crush is.

Swift kept experimenting to make her music more pungent, more extreme, even more her. Burt identifies how her swerves into synth pop (for 2014’s 1989 ) and hip-hop and R&B (for 2017’s Reputation ) broadened both how Swift wrote and what she wrote about. She tried on different attitudes, different subplots, and different notions about how words and rhythm and notes interact. A soft dancehall groove on “Delicate” matched her tale of secretive, tiptoeing courtship; the disco spiral of “Style” framed a romance that “has no particular destination,” Burt writes. Her 2020 duo of albums, Folklore and Evermore, channeled the sound and sensibility of indie rock, refracting her perennial personal themes through a dark, blurry lens of fantasy and allegory. She was moving into a newly rewarding phase: making emotionally ambivalent, sonically omnivorous music about the anxieties of her 30s—aging, work, commitment. Her 2022 album, Midnights, first scanned as a return to the safety of beats-driven pop, but the lyrics were bracingly candid, the confessions of a onetime child star wondering if she would ever truly grow up.

Swift’s zigs and zags were well timed for cultural and technological shifts that were dissolving the very meaning of pop. Thanks to streaming—which started to take off after the release of Red—success in music no longer always entails landing a hit single that drives album sales. Luring as many people as possible to listen to your music as compulsively as possible is now the goal. Even as Swift balked at Spotify’s pay rates (she pulled her catalog off the platform from 2014 to 2017), she took the opportunity afforded by its influence to deepen and densify the classic format of the pop song. This thrilled her base—and annoyed many casual listeners.

Much of pop now follows her example. A cohort of young female singer-songwriters—including Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, and Gracie Abrams—has arisen over the past five years, delivering storytelling-driven, personally revealing bubblegum. These artists no doubt saw themselves in the plucky perspective that Swift’s lyrics conveyed. But more important, they’ve clearly studied her methods in order to express their experiences in a way that—like any well-delivered yarn—can resonate broadly.

[From the May 2023 issue: Taylor Swift and the sad dads]

As for Swift, she’s been straining the pop format nearly to its breaking point. Her 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department, is—even among fans—her most divisive work. Its full form (the “Anthology” edition, which was released the same night as the normal edition) contains 31 songs. Grokking it fully requires knowing the convoluted backstory about an early midlife crisis of sorts. It’s an album about restlessness, impulsivity, consequences, and a very specific-to-Swift brew of personal hurt and public judgment. More than anything, it’s an album in which narrative trumps all. The songs ramble and double back and change shape; she and her producers (Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner) use perplexing time signatures and unsettling, bittersweet chord patterns. Tortured Poets is almost her crowning artistic achievement, containing the most complex and unguarded—and gorgeous—songs of her career.

Almost. The problem with Tortured Poets highlights a problem with Swift that’s been there all along. If she is a genius—and here’s my faint praise—she’s a genius at making diamonds out of doggerel. Her best songs daisy-chain clichés into novel shapes (“The Archer” on 2019’s Lover: “Easy they come, easy they go / I jump from the train, I ride off alone / I never grew up, it’s getting so old”). Her worst songs lumber along with clanging metaphors and leaden coinages (“Willow” on Evermore: “Every bait and switch was a work of art”). Fans mostly don’t mind this, and as a listener, I often don’t either; the overall effect of her music is what counts. But the stark, brooding palette of Tortured Poets casts an unforgiving light on some of the least consistent writing of her career. I adore the melty, country-trip-hop sound of “Guilty as Sin?,” except for the part where the arrangement slows down and she says this: “You’ve haunted me so stunningly,” precisely enunciating the last word, as if it made much sense.

[Read: The Tortured Poets Department is a muddle (with some magic)]

I’d hoped that Burt, herself a wordsmith, might have some gentle feedback to give about such clunkiness. Instead, she praises the album’s multisyllabic excess for executing a conceptual bit: Swift making herself into a tortured poet trying to outdo a pretentious, typewriter-wielding ex. This effort, in Burt’s telling, reflects the broader female experience of falling for a dashing, manipulative “art monster.” Swift is kind of doing this—the delightful title track goes, “You’re not Dylan Thomas, I’m not Patti Smith / This ain’t the Chelsea Hotel, we’re modern idiots”—but that shouldn’t necessitate ruining otherwise great songs. The search for a mote of relatability has led Burt to excuse-making. Any claim for Swift’s genius should reckon with her lapses into imprecision and pompousness. She has the chops to do better than she often does.

That criticism doesn’t hold Swift—who just announced her 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl—to an unfair standard. It recognizes the level she’s long aspired to and has often hit. Swift’s trajectory and the hype around it embody a utopian dream: the perfect marriage between pop music and art music. The two were never separate, really, but pop is an art of compromise—and these days, Swift seems less bound by limits. Can she get deeper, realer, less relatable without sacrificing the pleasure of a tale well told or a song well sung? Might she branch out from the I ? Or might she rewrite her narrative again in a way only someone as singular as her could? The suspense is part of the story.

This article appears in the October 2025 print edition with the headline “Songs of Herself.”

The Music of Millennial Idealism

2025-08-29T09:00:00-04:00

As far as rock stardom goes, Grizzly Bear was never an obvious candidate. A Brooklyn-based band that formed in 2002, it specialized in subtlety—delicate riffs, choir-like singing, meandering melodies. Some musicians ask their crowds to “make some noise”; in the new book Such Great Heights: The Complete History of the Indie Rock Explosion, the music journalist Chris DeVille remembers seeing Grizzly Bear’s lead singer praise an audience for being “so quiet and attentive.”

Yet by 2009, Grizzly Bear was a hot ticket. The band’s album Veckatimest debuted in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 200—and would eventually sell 1.1 million copies worldwide, buoyed by its single “Two Weeks” appearing in a Super Bowl commercial for Volkswagen. When Jay-Z and Beyoncé attended one of the band’s concerts, it seemed a sign that the tectonic plates of culture were shifting. Grizzly Bear was indie; Jay-Z and Beyoncé represented what indie was supposedly independent from: the mainstream. But the separation between the two worlds was becoming blurrier every day. Reacting to observers who’d been surprised to see him at the show, Jay-Z told MTV News, “What the indie rock movement is doing right now is very inspiring.”

The phrase indie rock originated in the late ’70s to refer to niche, punk-influenced bands—Buzzcocks, Hüsker Dü, R.E.M.—that got their start distributing their own records and booking their own shows. But during the 2000s, it came to refer to all sorts of art and product united by a vague preference for scruffiness over polish. Indie included songs on the Billboard Hot 100, such as Modest Mouse’s “Float On.” It encompassed the music on The O.C., a show watched by millions. It was a consumer economy that made vintage clothing and microbrewed beer into corporate endeavors (pour one out for American Apparel). And eventually, the term seemed to lose any meaning. Twenty-first-century indie shaped the identities of many Millennials, but it’s now often talked about with pitying nostalgia—as the bygone style of hipsters with handlebar mustaches pretending to be countercultural while making easy-listening music for hotel lobbies.

DeVille’s book is a meticulous recounting of that twee and heady era. A writer and editor for the stalwart music blog Stereogum, DeVille catalogs indie’s permutations with the enthusiasm of a baseball-card collector, astutely sorting small developments amid larger trends. (For example: I’d never before considered how the availability of Wi-Fi internet drove demand for coffee-shop-friendly music.) But as to what indie meant—whether it was understood best as an artistic renaissance, a marketing fad, a by-product of technological change—he offers a shrug: “Multiple interpretations are valid.” The book also has a bit of an elegiac feel, suggesting that whatever indie was, it’s definitively over. Yet in many ways, indie still lives—and represents an idealistic approach to art and culture that’s well worth preserving.

The book opens with a reminiscence from DeVille’s adolescence in the late ’90s. While the girls at his high school listened to MTV stars like Britney Spears, the boys followed nu metal bands such as Korn—though DeVille never fully connected with that music’s rageful essence. Eventually, he got into the artier angst of Deftones, which led him to Radiohead, which led him to full-blown music geekdom. “For me, indie wasn’t about DIY ethics, avant-garde disruption, or any kind of radical worldview,” he writes. “It was about albums I could spin incessantly and organize into lists in place of a personality, songs I could burn onto mix CDs for my friends and family to show off my good taste, and bands that doubled as a secret handshake with people cooler than me.”

His trajectory mirrors my own journey from Incubus-loving tween to Shins-loving teen, but I found the explanation of his own motives a little depressing. Smug posturing and insularity were certainly part of the subculture, but so—at least we told ourselves—was serious musical appreciation. Mainstream musical offerings of the time tended toward the overly macho or overly feminine, overly loud or overly slick—but indie appeared to value complexity and smarts. Albums such as Modest Mouse’s The Moon & Antarctica and Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot didn’t seem like they were created to perform an identity or please a constituency; they were, instead, exploring abstract musical and lyrical ideas.

Of course, believing you’re too sensitive and authentic to care about identity categories is an identity itself—as indie’s transformation into a lifestyle-branding buzzword would come to demonstrate. Many of the scene’s prominent artists were white and male, and the scene was brimming with naivete and privilege (making weird music for no money is a lot easier when you have a trust fund, as some artists did). But there’s a reason that, as DeVille carefully tracks, the term indie evolved beyond the white-dudes-with-guitars stereotype to encompass a variety of rappers, R&B singers, and even low-wattage pop divas. Indie is, at base, an aesthetic sensibility: a belief about what music is for. It stakes out a zone between the avant-garde notion of music as pure sound and the pop notion of music as pure pleasure. Indie says it’s nice to hear someone do something different.

[Read: What’s the appeal of indie rock’s new golden boy?]

What helped early-2000s indie blow up was the new way music was able to travel. The internet—listening platforms such as Napster and iTunes, emergent media such as music blogs—gave a scattered constellation of scrappy bands new reach. Indie’s predecessor scenes, such as ’90s grunge or ’70s post-punk, were all rooted in real-life neighborhood venues where bands, listeners, and journalists mingled. Indie’s bands arose from specific local conditions too. But we fans, in large part, got invested virtually. Kids scattered all over the world were listening deeply and solitarily in headphones—and swapping songs and opinions about those songs online.

Perhaps this is also why, despite the connotations of the word indie, fans didn’t tend to accuse their faves of selling out when they got popular. When music is a purely aesthetic endeavor, severed from any particular material or geographical context, what does it matter if Red Bull is sponsoring a tour? Certainly, when my beloved Modest Mouse started to gain mainstream traction, I don’t recall feeling defensive of the band’s purity. I wasn’t a follower who’d seen the band gigging in bars for years; I’d just discovered it in some online listicle. I liked the music it made, and I was glad I’d have more people to talk about it with.

Being the first mass musical movement to flourish online also explains 2000s indie’s relatively dangerless aura. Previous books chronicling rock scenes, such as Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life or Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me, were full of juicy anecdotes set in tour buses and rock clubs. Indie bands, no doubt, have plenty of those sorts of stories to share. But DeVille has no dishy scoops to impart. Such Great Heights tells the story of indie as it was experienced by its consumers: largely through a succession of Pitchfork reviews. The publication—founded in 1996 and famous for the decimal-point precision with which it rates albums—is mentioned more than a hundred times in the book, raising the question of whether the story of indie is really the story of one website’s influence.

Pitchfork has long gotten a bad rap for snottiness and tortured writing, but it’s an important institution for a reason. By the early 2000s, Rolling Stone seemed overly preoccupied with Boomer artists of fading vitality; Spin, while containing punchy criticism, was a glossy consumer magazine inflected by celebrity and fashion. Pitchfork, by contrast, had a near monastic devotion to talking about music as music. In 2024, the site’s founder, Ryan Schreiber, told The New York Times that he wanted to create something “that was very tough from a critical standpoint,” and that was guided by a question: “Who’s making music that’s truly innovative and progressive?”

[Read: A dark omen for the future of music]

The credibility of that description is well supported by Pitchfork’s history of trashing once-praised bands whenever their new work sounded repetitive or unadventurous. And the site really does have a record of championing albums that had an evolutionary impact on the way music sounds. In the early 2000s, a vein of innovation was being mined by artists twisting folk traditions into new shapes (Sufjan Stevens’s whimsical orchestration, Animal Collective’s ghostly harmonizing, Joanna Newsom’s harp epics). Other bands, such as Arcade Fire and the Postal Service, were turning away from the disaffection that characterized Gen X rock to express bighearted feelings in bespoke ways.

Of course, not all—or even most—indie bands were groundbreaking. DeVille traces the knockoff effect that happened over time, like when the unpredictable pop experimentalists of MGMT were succeeded—and commercially eclipsed—by bands with blander takes on their ideas (Capital Cities, Foster the People, Empire of the Sun). As the homespun sounds of early-2000s indie rock became mall-soundtrack fare, tastemakers took a new interest in rap, R&B, pop, and electronic music. This turn remains controversial—whatever’s wrong with culture today, you can find someone tracing the problem back to the rise of so-called poptimism, the belief that mainstream entertainers were worthy of critical appraisal, not instinctive disdain. DeVille suggests—quite fairly—that indie’s poptimist turn was sneaky snobbery, reactions against the popularity of groups like Mumford & Sons. But the underlying truth is that, by the mid-2010s, a lot of “truly innovative and progressive” music wasn’t originating from bands. It was coming from genre-agnostic internet natives wielding software and a mic, like Frank Ocean.

The real reason that indie started to die, or at least felt as though it did, is Spotify. As streaming supplanted downloads and album sales, it automated music discovery. Instead of reading Pitchfork or asking a record-store clerk for recommendations, more and more people began to let algorithms suggest their next obsession. This had a variety of consequences. One is that it’s become harder than ever for challenging music—music that you need to listen to a few times in order to love—to gain a foothold. The prestige associated with doing something different has started to fade.

Streaming, with its paltry pay rates, also made living off small and passionate fan bases harder for artists to sustain. But the economics of indie were always tenuous. DeVille notes that the scene’s boom synced up with the brief few years when iTunes downloads drove music consumption—thereby allowing small labels to make bigger margins by focusing less on physical products. Corporate patronage, driven by the hype surrounding indie, also rained paydays on off-beat artists. But in a 2012 New York magazine feature, Grizzly Bear revealed that—for all of the band’s outward success—its members weren’t even making a middle-class income. The band’s music remained too outré to get played on commercial radio stations, which were still important drivers of mainstream success. A decade later, the band’s lead singer, Ed Droste, launched a new career as a therapist.

Still, Jay-Z’s quote about Grizzly Bear proved prophetic: Pop really did take inspiration from indie. Beyoncé’s rapturously acclaimed 2013 self-titled album was moody, adventuresome, dripping with hipster rhetoric: “Soul not for sale,” she sang. “Probably won’t make no money off this, oh well.” Indie veterans such as Jack Antonoff, Aaron Dessner, and Dan Nigro became era-defining pop producers by helping Taylor Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and other celebrities make introspective, quirky, rock-adjacent anthems. Pop didn’t give up the prerogative to broad appeal. But indie’s values—valorizing authentic self-expression and sonic exploration—probably did shape the desires of a generation of listeners.

As for indie music itself, it’s still here. It just went back to being what it was in the first place: a niche, an underground, a restless creative philosophy. Every day, Pitchfork still champions some artist—in rock or rap or some entirely new genre—whom I haven’t heard of and who challenges my ears. Music nerds are, for example, currently digging into weirdos such as Geese (a Gen Z band whose songs have a polyrhythmic, semi-comic intensity) and Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band (imagine Jimmy Buffett doing eight-minute, science-fiction-inflected sermons). On Wednesday, Pitchfork even spotlighted a baffling hip-hop offshoot that refers to itself as … “indie rock.” The music of the margins is not likely to find the reach it did for a few fleeting years of the 2000s. But great things, indie insists, are made for their own sake.

How Justin Bieber Finally Gave Us the Song of the Summer

2025-07-26T09:30:00-04:00

Can this really be the song of the summer? For seven weeks now, the most popular tune in the country has been Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”—a solemn ballad that has all of the warm-weather appropriateness of a fur coat. Ideally, the song of the summer is a buoyant one, giving you a beat to bob a flamingo floatie to. “Ordinary,” instead, is made for stomping, moping, and forgetting.

The top reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 have otherwise mostly been stale and flukey, filled with songs that were popular last summer (Teddy Swims’s “Lose Control”), replacement-level efforts by the streaming behemoths Drake and Morgan Wallen, and tie-ins from the Netflix cartoon show KPop Demon Hunters. Then, just last week, a welcome bit of warmth and novelty emerged at No. 2—“Daisies” by Justin Bieber, the unlikely emblem of our obviously fragile national mood.

Perhaps you aren’t inclined to check out new music by a formerly chirpy child star who lately has been best known for his surreal interactions with paparazzi. But earlier this month, the 31-year-old Bieber suddenly released a new album, Swag, that made headlines for being rather good. Not “good for Bieber”; good for a modern pop release. Swag filled a void in the summer-listening landscape by meeting listeners where they so clearly seem to be—less in need of a party-fueling energy drink than a soothing slather of aloe.

The album is Bieber’s first since parting ways with manager Scooter Braun, the record-business kingpin who recently seemed to suffer a catastrophic collapse in support from the celebrity class. The music departs from the pert poppiness of Bieber’s past to indulge the singer’s well-documented fascination with hip-hop and R&B. In one interlude, the comedian Druski tells Bieber “your soul is Black”; the assertion is cringey, but the album’s music is significantly more subtle than that. Bieber never really raps. Rather, he uses his ever-yearning, creamy-soft voice to do what great rappers and R&B singers often do: find a pocket within a beat, and then let emotions be his guide.

What’s really fascinating about the album, though, is that it sounds like it’s wrapped in gauze. The production is aqueous and rippling, rather than shiny and laminated as one might expect from Bieber. Swag is heavily influenced by the indie producer-artists Dijon (who collaborated on a few of the album’s songs) and Mk.gee (a producer on “Daisies”). They have risen to prominence by swirling bygone rock and pop signifiers into a comforting yet complex stew of sound. Swag’s songs similarly hit the listener with a sense of gentle intrigue, like a minor recovered memory.

The instant hit “Daisies” exemplifies the approach. Its twanging guitars and pounding drums scan as countrified classic rock, but every element seems muffled, as if emanating from an iPhone lost in a couch. The verses steadily build energy and excitement—but then disperse in a gentle puff of feeling. In a lullaby whisper, Bieber sings of pining for his girl and sticking with her through good times and bad. “Hold on, hold on,” goes one refrain: a statement of desire for safety and stability, not passion and heat.

But my personal song-of-the-summer nomination would be Swag’s opening track, “All I Can Take.” It opens in a tenor of pure cheese, with keyboard tones that were last fashionable when Steve Winwood and Boyz II Men were soundtracking school dances. A lightly pumping beat comes to the fore, setting the stage for a parade of different-sounding Biebers to perform. In one moment, he’s a panting Michael Jackson impersonator. In another, he’s an electronically distorted hyperpop sprite. The song is serene, and pretty, and ever so sad—yet it’s also wiggling with details that suggest there’s more to the story than initially meets the ear. The lyrics thread together sex talk with hints of stresses that must be escaped; “It’s all I can take in this moment,” Bieber sings, hinting at a burnout whose cause the listener is left to imagine.

Swag’s approach—downtempo yet bustling, melancholic yet awake—is on trend emotionally as much as it is musically. Though the year has brought no shortage of bright, upbeat pop albums from the likes of Lady Gaga and Kesha, the music that’s sticking around has a reserved, simmering quality. The biggest Wallen song of the moment is “What I Want,” a collaboration with the whisper-singing diva Tate McRae; it builds suspense for a full minute before any percussion enters. One rising hit, Ravyn Lenae’s “Love Me Not,” has a neo-soul arrangement that fidgets enough to keep the ear occupied without demanding active attention.

A dreary technological reason probably explains why this kind of music is popular: Streaming rewards background fare more than it rewards jolting dynamism. But even looking at my own recent playlists, downtempo seems in. The best song by Addison Rae, the TikTok phenom turned pop mastermind, is “Headphones On,” a chill-out track laden with tolling bells and jazz keyboards. I have kept returning to the album Choke Enough by Oklou, a French singer who makes electronic pop that’s so skeletal and frail-seeming, you worry you’re despoiling the songs merely by listening to them. Other recent highlights: the mumbled and dreamy indie rock of Alex G’s Headlights, the depressive easy listening of Haim’s I quit, and “Shapeshifter,” the wintry-sounding standout from Lorde’s Virgin.

It’s hard to avoid psychoanalyzing this season’s musical offerings and concluding that the culture is suffering from malaise, or at least a hangover. After all, just a year ago we had “Brat summer,” named for the hedonistic Charli XCX album. The songs of that summer were irrepressible: Sabrina Carpenter’s sarcastic “Espresso,” Kendrick Lamar’s taunting “Not Like Us,” and Shaboozey’s thumping “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” But this year, Charli XCX’s biggest song is “Party 4 U”—a pandemic-doldrums ballad released in 2020 that recently blew up thanks to a TikTok trend of people sharing emo stories about their lives. The track captures a bleary feeling of trying to have fun but getting pulled into melancholy.

That’s a feeling lots of Americans surely can relate to. Every era brings its own reasons to fret about the state of the world, but the headline-news topics of late—wars, deportations, layoffs—are upending lives in profound ways at mass scale. Swag isn’t about any of that, but great pop always works to make small and personal emotions echo broad, communal ones.

Bieber’s highly publicized experiences navigating mental health, drug use, and physical maladies have long served up a cautionary tale about life in the internet era. In the months leading up to Swag’s release, he posted angry, inscrutable messages online and confronted reporters on the streets. Pundits have taken to asking Is he okay? The cooling, noncommittal, lightly distressed sound of Swag is an answer of sorts. Like many of us, he’s doing as well as can be, given the circumstances.