Chappell Roan has created an all-new identity crisis for the country charts

Technically, “The Giver”, Chappell Roan’s latest single, is a surprise release, but the anticipation for it has been building for months. The song was performed on Saturday Night Live in early November, at what will surely remain the highest rated episode of the show’s 50^th season (notably, this was the episode which included a cameo from Kamala Harris three days before the 2024 presidential election), and its stark contrast with the majority of the Chappell Roan catalogue made it a subject of fascination among the many fans she had picked up over the preceding months.

The four-and-a-half months which have passed since Roan’s SNL debut have felt like years, and therefore the time since she became a legitimate pop star has felt like centuries. But it was less than a year ago, when Chappell Roan released her previous single “Good Luck, Babe!”, that in an era of songs by established artists debuting at #1 with relative ease, a song that eventually was streamed over 1.3 billion times didn’t even chart in its first week, and when it did, it only debuted at #77. And yet this marked her biggest chart triumph ever; although her debut album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess was critically acclaimed, it did not become a bona fide pop culture sensation until the summer of 2024. She has since charted a top five song (the aforementioned “Good Luck, Babe!”), a top ten song (“Pink Pony Club”), and the #15 “Hot to Go!”, in addition to several other songs that charted often after years of buildup. But “The Giver” is the first single to be released by Chappell Roan since she became a genuine pop culture force, somebody whose cultural cachet arguably exceeds her strong chart positions. It’s not that “The Giver” is her best single or her single most written with commercial ambitions at the forefront (I would argue it’s neither, even if this is more of a compliment to her previous work than a critique of “The Giver”). It’s that an established pedigree as a pop star plays a big role in whether a song becomes a hit. I fully expect “The Giver” to be Chappell Roan’s first American number one single.

Whether they reached the peaks one believes they deserved is subjective, but songs like “Hot to Go!” and “Good Luck, Babe!” are clearly pop radio songs in the technical sense. There really isn’t a credible argument for playing either on an R&B station, or a rock station, or any other genre-based playlist. But “The Giver” is different. “The Giver” is, by any clinical definition, a country song.

How “country” any given country artist is has been a time-honored tradition among country music purists—there were plenty of people who thought prime Dolly Parton was too pop, not to mention plenty of people who felt the same way about Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, Kenny Chesney, or Luke Bryan. But by the standard of country-ness that defines modern country radio, “The Giver” fits most if not all of the criteria sonically. With its neo-traditional country instrumentation, including an honest-to-God fiddle solo, one could argue it’s more country than most “country” that plays on the radio.

Will “The Giver” receive country radio airplay? I suspect it probably will not: partially because Chappell Roan, prior to this, was by no means a country music artist; partially because the LGBT-themed lyrics are quite on the nose for a format that has grown more tolerant over the years but is still certainly right-of-center on cultural issues; partially because the song almost reads as an attack on traditional pop-country lyrical themes (though this didn’t stop, say, Maddie & Tae from having a massive country hit was the bro-country takedown “Girl in a Country Song”). But that doesn’t mean that it cannot make an impact on the country charts—there is precedent for this.

Before Lil Nas X’s breakthrough “Old Town Road” became arguably the Song of the Summer of 2019, it was effectively a cause because of its relationship to country music. In March 2019, the song charted simultaneously on the Billboard country and R&B/hip-hop charts; when it was unceremoniously dropped from the country chart for supposedly lacking sufficient elements of country music. When it came to Lil Nas X, a young African-American man from the South, there was a very obvious elephant in the room—his race in an overwhelmingly white musical genre. But in the defense of the country establishment, which had elevated the likes of Darius Rucker and Kane Brown in recent years, “Old Town Road” was marginally country-influenced at most. I don’t have a strong opinion on whether it should have been on the country charts either way, but it featured a strong trap beat built around a Nine Inch Nails sample—even when Billy Ray Cyrus was invited for a verse on the remix, this was still very much a hip-hop-forward song at its core.

Last year, in contrast to the newcomer Lil Nas X, one of the biggest pop stars in the world, released her first true forays into country music, with Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter. And while the album as a whole was somewhat varied by genre, with heavy R&B and traditional blues elements very much present, debut single “Texas Hold ‘Em” was a reasonably straightforward country song. There was initial controversy when country radio stations would not play the song, but it’s not unreasonable that those who had not yet actually heard the song would dismiss it, not because of an assumption of lack of quality nor because of an assumption of Beyonce’s inability to make country, but because of tons of precedent suggests that Beyonce is not a country artist. “Texas Hold ‘Em”, a country song, was a #1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 and on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, but it peaked at only #33 on the Billboard Country Airplay chart, the same spot as it peaked on the Adult Alternative Songs chart.

Genre divides are not nearly as strong as they once were. It is reasonable to have genre-based radio stations, but vanishingly rare is the country radio listener who listens to absolutely nothing but what is being fed to them on country radio. I think a lot about the diversity of charts on which Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” appeared in 2011—in addition to being an omnipresent #1 hit, it charted in the top sixteen on the charts for Dance Club Songs, Rock Airplay, Hot Rock & Alternative Songs, and Latin Pop Airplay. On one hand, this is confusing on the basis of genre (for those who somehow have not heard this song, it treads closer to soul than any of these genres), but on the other hand, it makes intuitive sense if you work under the correct assumption that the song’s popularity largely transcended race, gender, age, or any other demographic. A white woman from London didn’t chart on the Latin Pop Airplay because she steered into Latin Pop culture so much as she made an undeniable banger.

Chappell Roan is a white woman from Missouri (as a Missourian, I was legally obligated to mention this within the first 1200 words or face criminal punishment), so in terms of pure demographic destiny, her as a country star isn’t unusual. As an open lesbian whose stage show is littered with LGBT influences, however, she is arguably more at odds with conservative country culture than Beyonce, who is famously in a monogamous heterosexual marriage. I have no doubts that plenty of country music enjoyers will enjoy this song—plenty were enjoying her decidedly non-country music anyway. But exactly what the country establishment makes of Chappell Roan should be genuinely fascinating.

The How I Met Your Mother finale isn’t good. It’s great.

Two important notes before I start. One, yes, I realize that I am discussing a random show I watched for the first time eleven years after it ended. Two, many spoilers ahead.

Even if you have never seen How I Met Your Mother, which I will henceforth be abbreviating as HIMYM for simplicity, you can probably guess that a show which lasted nine seasons isn’t really the story of two people meeting. HIMYM is the story of a man living his mid-twenties to mid-thirties in New York City. It’s about his friends and his girlfriends, and while Ted Mosby claims that all of the more episodic tales are all part of the bigger picture, the story could’ve been resolved with a decent amount of detail in, like, one episode.

I knew many of the basic details of HIMYM’s final episode before I started to watch the show, so I do have some unfair advantages. I knew Barney and Robin, around whose wedding the ninth season is centered, would get divorced. I knew Ted’s eventual wife, by the time the story was being told, was deceased. But to be fair, some of the most critical information of the series is learned on the very first episode. We know that Ted eventually has a daughter and a son. We know that Robin, the woman with whom Ted was immediately smitten in the first episode, would eventually become “Aunt Robin”, not the mother of the children. We know that Barney, Lily, Marshall, and Robin remain at least enough in Ted’s life that he can reference them as aunts and uncles and his children would understand it.

There is no mystery to the fact that eventually Ted would find a woman with whom to have children, but the reveal of who she is and what she would be like remains intact essentially until the waning moments of Season 8, when we see The Mother, revealed in the series finale to be named Tracy McConnell, purchasing a train ticket. Tracy is portrayed by Cristin Milioti, a relatively unknown actress who was probably best known for her Broadway work and a three-episode stint on The Sopranos but has since gone on to one of the more notable post-HIMYM careers among the cast (she portrayed Jordan Belfort’s first wife in The Wolf of Wall Street, a $400 million Martin Scorsese movie, during the final season; perhaps this was inevitable).

Tracy became an instantly beloved character; she was funny, charming, beautiful, and compassionate. Although Ted had a few seasons worth of questionable behavior, the audience still ultimately wanted him to be happy, and suddenly the absolute perfect woman for him was seemingly dropped from the sky.

The meet-cute between Ted and Tracy—the close call of Ted accidentally beginning his first class as a professor in an economics lecture hall in which Tracy was sitting, Ted briefly dating Tracy’s roommate and nearly meeting her, Ted’s closest friends being helped in a moment of existential crisis by Tracy before the two ever conversed—is objectively corny and improbable. But the defining episode, I would argue of the series but certainly of HIMYM’s final season, grounds Tracy. It turns her from Ted’s manic pixie dream girl into a three-dimensional character. 

Season nine is, to be clear, not a perfect season of television—the episode Slapsgiving 3: Slappointment in Slapmarra is an astonishingly bad taste and not even particularly funny beyond its use of white actors to deploy Asian stereotypes, most notably. But it does have How Your Mother Met Me.

This episode is the one in the series in which Tracy is the main character. It essentially catches us up from the beginning of HIMYM to the weekend of the wedding, and we learn that on the night that Ted met Robin, Tracy experienced a life-altering tragedy—the death of her boyfriend Max. Without question, this is the defining moment of her life from 2005 through 2013, and she takes a subsequent hiatus from dating for several years. But even when she starts dating Louis, a decent guy but one who isn’t seemingly an amazing fit for her, it is clear that Tracy is still haunted by Max. When Louis proposes to her, she needs a moment to step outside and ask to the Heavens if she had permission to move on with her life.

Much of HIMYM is framed around Ted’s insistence on finding The One, a hypothetical perfect match. But as Tracy mentions in the series, she believes that she found and lost her The One by the end of her twenty-first birthday. That she was even willing to entertain the possibility of dating Ted required several strokes of luck, as she still had her doubts about dating even after her long-term relationship with Louis.

This sounds painfully obvious but it’s worth a reminder—Tracy McConnell is a fictional character portrayed by a real person, Cristin Milioti, who is still alive. While Tracy was “killed off” in the series finale at an age of no older than forty, this didn’t really happen.

I would not wish for a seemingly good person like Tracy to die young, but that is a thing that happens sometimes. HIMYM handled the subject of death better than most when it came to the passing of Marshall’s father Marvin—it hit like a lightning bolt (he died of a heart attack, whereas Tracy died of a long-term illness) and his healing process was slow. It took several episodes for Marshall to be anywhere near emotionally recovered, and in a medium—a CBS sitcom with a laugh track—where character emotions tend to reset at the beginning of every episode. Even though we never see Tracy’s college-age boyfriend Max, he still exists in the show’s universe. As with Marshall, who mourns the loss of his father and then is able to pay tribute to him by naming his first-born son after him, Tracy pays her own form of tribute to Max by remaining indebted to her memory of him but ultimately doing what is best for herself by living her best life. It is never spoken, but Tracy is not the first person to have lost a significant other who went on to date or marry somebody else, and as is essentially always the case, Tracy surely still loved Max in a way that was not lessened by, and did not diminish her love for, Ted.

A common fan complaint about Season 9 is the sense that the audience didn’t get to spend enough time with Tracy. But this was the story of how Ted met the mother of his children—not how he courted her, not how he started a family with her, and not of how he lost her.

Ted surely loved Tracy just as Tracy had loved Max. But just as Tracy’s life was improved by finding love with Ted, Ted’s would be improved by rekindling his love with Robin. Robin, in some ways the actual main character of HIMYM since her arrival into the friend group is the jumping off point, loved Ted so much that she was questioning her marriage to Barney on the day of their wedding. Ted infamously professed his love for Robin on their first date. And as idyllic as Tracy was, Robin was clearly a great match for Ted. And I have no doubt it would be Tracy approved, as she knew from firsthand experience that finding new love after the death of a partner can help to soothe a broken heart.

I knew Tracy was going to die. Contemporary audiences did not. Contemporary audiences saw a man asking another woman out five minutes after the death of his wife and the mother of his children. But for his children, who surely knew Tracy much better than they knew “Aunt Robin”, it was six years later. And they immediately encourage Ted to date Robin. It wasn’t the conclusion of Ted’s healing process, one that would surely exist on some level for the rest of his life, but rather a major step along the way.

Circumstances are a major part of romantic love. The early romance of Ted and Robin fell apart because Robin didn’t want a commitment nor children, and by the early 2010s, she is brokenhearted by news that she cannot have children and marries a man with more of an aversion to marriage than she ever had. Ted nearly met Tracy at a St. Patrick’s Day party years earlier than he did meet her, and by his own account, he was a drunken idiot and Tracy was still too emotionally vulnerable for a new relationship. Robin could never replace Tracy, for Ted but especially for Tracy’s children, but how the children speak of Robin suggests that she has the maternal instincts to be a great stepmother. In an earlier episode, Ted openly weeps at the notion from Tracy that a mother will always be available for her daughter’s wedding, presumably because he already knows that Tracy will not survive to see her daughter’s wedding. Robin is probably the next-best person to fill that role.

Lily and Marshall, the perfect couple throughout the run of the series, are the only ones with a truly happy ending by the end of the show. But the other three do receive some level of closure. Barney, who had resumed his often sociopathic womanizing ways after he and Robin divorced, was settled down by the immediate love he felt for a daughter he openly never wanted. Robin, whose primary reason for not wanting to settle down is a desire to travel the world for her career (which ultimately causes her marriage to Barney to unravel), gets the opportunity to live out her dream. And Ted has the son and daughter he always wanted; and though Ted may not have gotten the perfect girl for him for as long as he might have wanted, he did get to find love that was twenty-five years in the making from the moment he first told Robin that he loved her.

If I accidentally did a Nazi salute, I would simply apologize for accidentally doing a Nazi salute

At the risk of sounding self-congratulatory, video of me making an apparent Nazi salute has never been recorded. Does this make me a hero? I wouldn’t quite go that far, but this is simply my truth.

Elon Musk has been accused of making a Nazi salute. In addition to being accused of making a Nazi salute, he has demonstrably made a Nazi salute—twice, in fact—at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on Monday. This is not a matter of debate—it is a bland statement of what there is video evidence to demonstrate. One can debate his motivations or his intent with varying degrees of success, but the gesture was made. Let’s put it this way: it is against the rules of the television show Jeopardy! to wager $1,488 because of the number’s association with white supremacist organizations, but let’s say it weren’t. If somebody were to wager that amount, it would be worth asking what their intent was. It’s possible that one thousand, four hundred and eighty-eight dollars was the truly sensible amount to bet, or that they picked a random number, but it’s a question worth asking. It may seem naïve to give the benefit of the doubt, but it’s at least possible. It would be an outright denial of reality to claim that the contestant didn’t actually make that wager. That would be both the basic outline for an I Think You Should Leave sketch and a perfect summation of the Donald Trump era of steadfast refusal to acknowledge absolutely anything.

I have never consciously made a Nazi salute, but I’m sure that my body has gestured in a manner at some context-free moment of my life where it would look that way. Perhaps I extended my arm to swat a fly out of my face. Perhaps I was stretching. If this happened at the exact time a camera was fixed on me, that would be unfortunate timing. If it happened while I was speaking at a presidential inauguration event (well, for a president in the United States, at least), that would be even more unfortunate. But it’s possible.

This is why I would be absolutely mortified to learn that my actions were being interpreted as an endorsement of the Third Reich, as has been the case with neo-Nazi groups who have celebrated Elon Musk’s gestures from Monday. I’m not necessarily sure what all of the steps of corrective action I would take would be, but the first one—apologizing for the appearance of pro-Nazism and condemning Nazis—is an extremely easy one. There isn’t an easier political stance to take in the last century of world politics than “Nazis are bad”—even most overt racists don’t go that far.

But Elon Musk hasn’t done this. There isn’t even the slightest expectation that he would consider even a half-hearted “sorry for how you interpreted things” apology, because the Donald Trump political movement’s entire backbone is built around never apologizing for anything, no matter how small or inconsequential it might be. Instead, everything is an excuse. Disgustingly, Elon Musk’s utterly gullible defenders have tried to argue that the salute was a result of Musk’s autism, an on-its-face absurd connection that still never gets around to the fact that whether intended or not the final result of his gesture was very very clearly a Nazi salute. 

The day after Trump’s first inauguration, the White House claimed in press events to have had the largest inaugural crowds in history, a fact that was very, very easily disproven with photographs from his inauguration and the inauguration of the first non-white president in history eight years earlier. It wasn’t some huge mystery why Barack Obama, a historic president, outdrew Donald Trump, the latest in a very long line of white men to hold the office. It is not, realistically, an indictment of Trump. But the desire to soothe Trump’s ego took priority over telling what was reality. Donald Trump adheres to some version of the George Costanza rule of “it’s not a lie if you believe it”, but where he tells lies so frequently that it barely seems worth the energy to fact-check him because it is such a frequent occurrence. And we’re back, like it never went away.

It's NFL playoff season and I live in Missouri—believe me, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen collective delusion about whether an arm movement is racist from the whitest people imaginable. And I might be able to move past what happened with even the slightest bit of contrition, or at least acknowledgement of what we all could see, but Elon Musk isn’t going to do that. He likes that he, the richest man to ever exist, gets to whine about how he has been persecuted. He likes that those who agree with his gesture will gravitate towards him. And he loves that none of this is going to materially impact his extraordinary wealth or his limitless string of government contracts.

I suppose, though, it is easy for me to say that if I did something that could easily be construed as pro-Nazi, I would condemn it immediately and vociferously to anybody who would listen. But this is also coming from the perspective that Nazis are bad. Not everybody agrees with me on that one.

Last weekend was boring because the College Football Playoff committee got it right

On Friday night, in a stinging indictment of the Big Ten Conference, supposedly one of the two top-tier conference in college football, Indiana lost to Notre Dame. In the next game, the Big Ten’s runners-up Penn State proved the superiority of the conference once and for all and demonstrated that SMU and the Atlantic Coast Conference are the true frauds, while that night, by defeating Tennessee, The Ohio State University proved that the Big Ten is superior to the Southeastern Conference, who demonstrated their superiority when runners-up Texas handily beat Clemson. In total, the only team that lost over the weekend that did not demonstrate that they should not have made the playoff was Clemson, and that was only on a technicality—if the format did not mandate five conference champions, Clemson would have been sitting at home because clearly they were not one of the twelve best teams in the country.

The purpose of the college football is nominally to determine the best team in the country, though more accurately, the purpose is to validate an organic search for the best team in the country. For most of college football history, Oregon would have been crowned national champions already. But the real purpose is to create a compelling television show. There is a reason that ESPN has produced weekly rankings specials about rankings that absolutely, positively do not matter—if the playoff committee decides that their old rankings no longer matter (they did this last season with Florida State), that’s all that matters.

There has been a lot of criticism of the College Football Playoff format, though I think that under the assumption that a playoff ought to be twelve teams, this one works out well in creating valid incentive structures throughout. Since the early 1990s, when the ranks of Division 1-A independents with a national profile was reduced pretty much just to Notre Dame, winning one’s conference is considered of major importance, and the playoff structure gives automatic first-round byes to its high-end champions while also dangling another bid to a fifth conference champion (most did not expect this bid to go to a perennial power such as Clemson in its first year). Being a strong non-conference champion gets something beneficial, though less beneficial than an outright automatic qualification to the quarterfinals—a home playoff game. Critics would try to make the case that a team like SMU was not punished for losing its conference championship game, but the reality of the situation is that because Clemson made a last-second field goal, they went from receiving a first-round bye to having a challenging matchup at Penn State which ultimately ended their season. A team like Texas, which made it to overtime of the SEC Championship Game, did not need a win to secure a playoff berth, but it did make the difference between a trip directly to the quarterfinals and the less-than-fifty-but-certainly-higher-than-zero percent chance of falling to the Clemson Tigers on their home field.

The first team to be deemed frauds last weekend was Indiana, and there were two approaches to the argument—one sensible and one borderline cruel. The latter is thumbing one’s nose at the very idea of Indiana having a viable football program and assuming they were on borrowed time. The former embraces a new reality of modern college football, particularly in the major conferences—there is a wild disparity in schedule quality even between teams in the same conference. Indiana only lost one game in the regular season, and it was a game that a college football power would ordinarily be forgiven for losing (on the road against Ohio State), but the quality of their wins was sorely lacking relative to the rest of the conference. Indiana won just one game against a team with a winning conference record, at home close against four-loss Michigan.

Indiana had a very flawed resume. This does not mean that they were not a good team, but it is completely reasonable that their one-loss schedule would not be seen as analogous to the one-loss Big Ten schedule of Penn State—the Nittany Lions defeated a 6-3 team (Illinois) and won on the road against a 5-4 team (Minnesota)—or two-loss Ohio State, which lost to the undefeated Oregon Ducks team that Indiana and Penn State avoided and which scored victories against not only Indiana and Penn State but also 6-3 Iowa.

Indiana coach Curt Cignetti told anybody who would listen that he believed Indiana deserved a better draw in the College Football Playoff—I disagreed, but with a one-loss season in a brand-name conference, I did not blame him for shooting his shot. But especially after their loss on Friday, it became more fashionable to argue that Indiana did not belong in the tournament at all. Yes, the Alabama Crimson Tide lost two more games than the Hoosiers, but they also boasted at least four wins that looked stronger than defeating Michigan—wins against Georgia, South Carolina, Missouri, and a decisive four-touchdown victory on the road against LSU. The argument against Alabama was pretty easy, though—while their seven-point loss at Tennessee could be considered a parallel to Indiana’s at Ohio State, their losses at Vanderbilt and especially at 6-6 Oklahoma by three touchdowns were a blight on their schedule.

There is a massive assumption that those who support, either from the beginning or in hindsight, Alabama over Indiana are making—that Alabama is a better team than Indiana. This is unprovable, but certainly possible. We know that Indiana lost by ten points (and this is a deceptively close margin given the overall tone of the game) at Notre Dame, but we do not know how Alabama would have fared. But the other assumption is that the purpose of the selection committee is to predict the future and not to evaluate the past. Unfortunately, there is not really a codified explanation of what the committee is supposed to do. I disagreed vehemently when the committee predicted the future (accurately) with regards to how Florida State would fare last season with quarterback Jordan Travis injured; my strong preference is to evaluate based on what has already happened. This doesn’t make the answers easier—yes, 3>1 in the loss column is a good and very easy to comprehend point, but had Alabama’s losses been at home to Georgia and at LSU and they had instead won at Vanderbilt and Oklahoma, we couldn’t really argue that a single game Alabama lost was more shameful than even Indiana’s best win. But then Alabama is a three-loss team whose best win is probably one at home against Missouri, which is also a better win than at home against Michigan but is it two losses better? These things do not have answers.

Ultimately, I think the committee got the 12-team bracket correct—I could quibble with some of the order, but I believe the four best conference champions got byes, the next four best teams got home games, and the next four best teams went on the road in the first round. And what those complaining about the lack of quality games this weekend seem to be missing is that the first round is supposed to be difficult for seeds 9 through 12. SMU suffered because of their conference championship loss. Clemson suffered because they needed a last-second field goal just to make the field in the first place. Tennessee suffered because they couldn’t win against a 3-5 SEC team in Arkansas. And Indiana suffered because in their one true test of the regular season, they failed it. Had Alabama made the playoff field, they would have faced an immense challenge—winning at Notre Dame, Penn State, Texas, or Ohio State is not easy! Alabama would have, and should have, been underdogs in any of these scenarios. So would Miami, so would Mississippi, so would South Carolina or BYU or Iowa State.

Assuming the current format remains, road teams will eventually win some playoff games. But they should not win most or even half of them, because if the games last weekend were essentially determined by random chance, it demonstrates a lack of credibility of the playoff. But because the home teams won, the remaining field is the six highest ranked teams in the country, a Boise State team whose one loss—a three-point one on the road against Oregon—is arguably the strongest in the country, and an Arizona State team that as the weakest team in the field on paper will face a challenge in Texas that they may have avoided had they themselves not lost to Texas Tech or Cincinnati.

The reason the games stunk last weekend is because the College Football Playoff committee got it right.

Drake is taking the biggest Thanksgiving week L since the post-Barry Sanders Lions

 If one is to regard a hip-hop battle as a sport, a binary in which any battle which is won is therefore also lost by another party, then Kendrick Lamar won his 2024 squabble with Drake in resounding fashion. On Future’s “Like That”, Kendrick already entered the pantheon of great rap battle verses, but Kendrick did not respond to his lead by playing defense—he ran up the score. First came “Euphoria”, a relentless, ferocious six-plus minutes of pure hatred placed over a trap beat. Then came “Meet the Grahams”, a horrorcore message to Drake’s family with shades of Eminem’s terrifying letter-as-song “Stan”. And then came the magnum opus, “Not Like Us”, which doubled as a danceable party track and a continuation of Drake criticism. “Not Like Us” became Kendrick Lamar’s third number-one single, and on paper by far the least likely. It was one thing to go to number one while guest-versing on a Taylor Swift single off what was already a juggernaut album (“Bad Blood”). While “HUMBLE.” was not exactly pop radio friendly in terms of lyrical content, it was the hip-hop equivalent of arena rock, an anthem of seismic proportion that was destined to live forever as a stadium beat. “Not Like Us” is a song in which the lead performer cracks jokes about one of the two or three biggest pop stars in the world being a sex predator, and it became arguably the song (and inarguably the hip-hop song) of Summer 2024.

But if you view the rivalry strictly as a narrative structure around which artists build their discographies, Kendrick winning does not inherently mean that Drake lost. The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, for instance, were significant inspirations for one another—the Beatles’ songwriting was a driving force for the Rolling Stones to evolve beyond the covers of American blues songs which filled their initial sets, while the more streetwise image and raw sound of the Rolling Stones served as a template of sorts for much of the Beatles’ post-Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band work, an evolution which allowed the band to avoid succumbing to self-parody. And Drake’s response to “Euphoria”, “Family Matters”, was one of the best pure demonstrations of Drake’s talents of his career—his flow is impeccable and the barbs at Kendrick are pointed. Drake, unfortunately, followed this up with his “Not Like Us” response “The Heart Part 6” (not to be confused with Kendrick Lamar’s “Heart Pt. 6”, which is great), easily the weakest of the duo’s back-and-forth, but this song was also largely forgotten. “Not Like Us” wasn’t, but the song arguably became too successful to continue to exist primarily as a referendum on Drake. Calling “Not Like Us” a Drake diss track is like calling “Sweet Home Alabama” a Neil Young diss track: like, it is, but it has taken on a life of its own far beyond these origins.

Kendrick Lamar keeps winning in ways that are mostly independent of Drake, who remains exceptionally famous and popular, one of the few artists in the world who is indeed more popular than Kendrick. His livestreamed concert “The Pop Out: Ken & Friends”, though undeniably linked to his broader cultural moment, was a cultural phenomenon. He was announced as the halftime performer at this year’s Super Bowl, just three years after he was a relatively minor part of the game’s LA-centric hip hop ensemble. And last Friday, he released GNX, his widely-hailed sixth studio album which combines the consistency of Good Kid, M.A.A.D City and the sheer force of Damn. Although various tracks off GNX have been interpreted as Drake references, none of the references are specific. One could make the case that the album is either the finale of the Drake-Kendrick beef or perhaps the first major work by either artist to follow it.

But Drake isn’t moving on. And while all logic indicates that Drake, a man that even his many detractors will openly admit is a technically hyper-gifted emcee, should simply release a pop-rap smash that he seems to churn out with ease, he has instead responded in what has to be the least endearing way possible—he called the cops. Drake has filed two lawsuits against Universal Music Group over “Not Like Us”, claiming both a payola-like scheme to inflate Kendrick Lamar’s streaming numbers and that the song defames Drake by accusing him of pedophilia.

The former claim seems patently absurd, though it makes some level of sense in the context of who Drake is. While Drake has been acclaimed throughout his career, very few who are passionate about such debates have claimed that he is an inner-circle, all-time great rapper, but one thing that he undisputably has on pretty much any artist ever is immense popularity. Drake is a massive hitmaker by any objective measure, and while any analysis declaring “Not Like Us” a knockout blow for Kendrick is inherently subjective, if consensus, what must truly be appalling for Drake is what a huge pop hit it became. Because that is the arena in which Drake plays the game. Of course, the problem is that it wasn’t as though Kendrick Lamar, an extremely popular artist by the standard of anyone that is not Drake already, having a huge hit is some big surprise. There is a reason that “Meet the Grahams” wasn’t a pop smash while “Not Like Us” was, and I’m not sure that I can even articulate it, but it’s there—it’s the same factors that make ABBA more popular than Primus. It is self-evident.

In terms of Drake’s claims to defamation, he has more of a point in this case. But in the realm in which he exists, bringing it to court is confounding. Drake, on “Family Matters”, accused Kendrick of domestic abuse and claimed that his child wasn’t biologically his, two claims which have no more merit as true than any claims Kendrick had made. But what will truly destroy Drake’s credibility is simply that bringing the law into the feud comes across as the move of a giant dork. Drake has been accused of being soft throughout his entire career, but for the most part, he has been immune to these criticisms in the court of public opinion because he never claimed to be some sort of hardcore gangster. His perceived sensitivity and emotional side is part of his appeal. But while Drake was never meant to be edgy, he was also never meant to be a loser. And it’s not as though a rap battle, even one with a clear victor, is meant to destroy the credibility of the other party. Biggie and Tupac both enjoy sterling reputations, even among those with a strong preference to the other; Jay-Z and Nas had a long-standing feud that has ended with both considered giants.

It should be okay that Drake lost a battle. He can go back in the studio, make some party anthems and sonically pristine love songs, and remain a superstar. That was always an option, and it probably remains one. But by getting into the legal system, Drake is risking something more devastating than losing a battle. He is risking losing a war.

A Democratic coalition that excludes the trans community is not a Democratic coalition worth saving

As of the time that I wrote this sentence, Donald Trump was leading Kamala Harris by 2.2% in the United States popular vote, though with much of the outstanding vote being concentrated in the liberal state of California, this number is likely to contract to something close to a point-and-a-half victory for Trump nationwide. In 2020, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump with a 4.5% victory in the popular vote, and the margin was considered so narrow that Trump’s supporters stormed the United States Capitol to dispute the results. With a victory a third as narrow by the popular vote, Democrats have been asked to capitulate to what must be regarded as the true reflection of the will of the American people.

I have a few theories as to why this is. The perception of how much of a blowout a presidential election is seems to boil down to a combination of three factors: Who won the popular vote (Democrats lead 7-2 in elections since 1988), who won the electoral vote (Democrats hold a 5-4 lead), and which party’s share just looks bigger on a red and blue electoral map (more subjective, but with the possible exception of Bill Clinton’s Montana-including 1992 coalition, the map consistently looks more red than blue). With the current urban-rural divide in the United States, it is practically impossible for Democrats to look dominant. Another factor is that while Election Night coverage is treated as a first-past-the-post race to 270 electoral votes, there is effectively a predetermined outcome based on fifty-one separate races which have mostly concluded by the time results are projected. There is a bias in coverage towards states whose polls close earlier—the reason Kentucky is frequently the first state called is not because it is the most politically uncompetitive state (like many “red states”, its largest cities, Louisville and Lexington, tend to vote Democratic, but they are ultimately overwhelmed by elsewhere in the state) but because they process results fairly quickly. During the Trump era, two former swing states, Ohio and Florida, went red fairly early in the night because of how they tabulate votes, and this set a (sometimes misleading) pro-Trump tone.

But if 2004, the last time a party got the popular vote-Electoral College-map vibes trifecta, is any indication, the lesson will not simply be that Republicans did well in 2024; the lesson will be that they have asserted a truly remarkable, historic victory which constitutes a mandate for absolute rule. To be clear, it is much more healthy for a democracy for a political party to recalibrate itself following an electoral loss, so as to better address the needs of the American electorate, rather than, say, dressing up in audacious bear costumes and trying to defecate in Nancy Pelosi's office. But it seems almost inevitable that all of the wrong lessons will be learned.

There is an extremely obvious thesis statement for why the Democrats lost, one which does not forgive the party of its individual sins but which places the improbability of them emerging victorious in proper context. Democrats lost in 2024 for the same reason that every party in power in the western world in 2024 has lost a share of votes, whether the party was considerably to the left or right of the Democratic Party, because there was economic hardship around the world in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Functionally shutting down the economy for a year caused economic stress (while Donald Trump's handling of it, to put it lightly, left much to be desired, it's hard to deny that he faced a legitimate challenge with the emergence of the pandemic), and inflation devastated the middle-and-lower classes around the world.

Democrats could have handled this better. They could have explained (it may not have been easy, but it very much helps that it was true) that inflation was an unavoidable problem, but that Democratic policies would help to ease the tensions far more than Republican policies, to the extent that they have politics beyond yelling about Democrats. They could have noted that high grocery prices were not caused by some dial that the government turns but rather by increasingly powerful and unregulated semi-monopolies and that while Donald Trump is often called a populist, he is in reality a crotchety billionaire who does not even pretend to care about the struggles of everyday Americans anymore. It's possible that these things would not have worked, but in any election with a distinct winner and loser established regardless of margin of victory, whatever Democrats did must now be viewed as bad, even as Kamala Harris made a nearly-historic comeback from Joe Biden's low poll numbers early in the summer.

The party keeps searching for One Big Thing that can be reversed and change everything. Many have tried the ultimate self-congratulatory takeaway: Democrats lost because they nominated a woman of color. This is a theory which presents the Democrats as undeniably noble and makes any further self-reflection borderline offensive. Those who believed that Kamala Harris should have picked Josh Shapiro as her running mate made their argument, though there is little reason to believe that Tim Walz was particularly unpopular, and even if (and it's a big "if") Shapiro could have delivered Pennsylvania, this alone would not have been enough. 

But ultimately, some people would rather just blame a minority. This happened in 2004, when Republican opposition to same-sex marriage activated the conservative religious right. Democrats, by and large, weren't even campaigning on a pro-gay rights platform--same-sex marriage was already illegal in nearly every jurisdiction in the country, but Republicans largely supported a Constitutional Amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. A few years later, that Democrats had been on the less-wrong side of history, when gay marriage became legal nationwide and its popularity skyrocketed, became a political advantage. But more importantly, it was the right thing to do.

I am not convinced that anti-trans panic had any meaningful impact on the presidential election. This does not mean that pro-trans politics are necessarily a strong political issue for the left, but rather that it does not seem to be of exceptionally high priority for most people. Republicans, of course, have framed these debates under their own terms, using language about protecting women's sports (every competitive women's sports organization in the country has strict rules regarding hormone levels to assure that, to use a particularly ludicrous suggestion, the league is not simply a bunch of men claiming that they are women) and protecting children, largely because Democrats mostly haven't talked about trans issues. In some ways, I think Democratic silence is instructive behavior--if trans people living their lives aren't a big deal, why should others try to make a big deal out of it?--but the more conservatives push anti-trans messaging, the more it becomes clearly that trans people need genuine allyship.

But while I don't think anti-trans panic had a meaningful impact on the 2024 election, it wouldn't matter if it had. Democrats have overwhelmingly popular positions on just about every issue as an organic result of their own worldviews--they should be allowed to have some positions based not on polling but on what is simply the right thing to do. The extreme shift on gay marriage--Barack Obama ran the most socially liberal campaign in a generation while still opposing gay marriage in 2008--demonstrates that our social views are not inevitable. And while opposition to gay marriage at least had some tenuous biblical backing (which, to be clear, should not inform national policy), opposition to trans rights largely comes down to an unarticulated sense of discomfort. This is the sense we are going to use to determine our future?

Democrats are consistently being asked to defend unpopular positions that their candidates have not actually taken. Liberals are ridiculed for advocating for defunding the police, a dead-on-arrival activist slogan. They are ridiculed for using the term "Latinx" or for being "too woke". If Democrats took an explicitly anti-trans stance, it would not stop Republicans from accusing them of whatever the most hateful stereotypes one could imagine. It would probably land much like the Biden's pro-Israel Middle Eastern posture: Republicans still call them anti-Israel. There is nothing Democrats could theoretically do to assuage fears of the most rabidly anti-trans corners of the political discourse.

Can Democrats force the issue and make trans rights viewed as a legitimate civil rights issue? I'm not sure, but whether it would work politically should not define the actions. Democrats should stand up for trans people because it's the right thing to do.

Repealing and replacing the American Dream

How could Missouri, a blood-red state so clearly aligned with the Republican Party that the major news networks declared it won by Donald Trump the minute that polls closed in the state, also vote to enshrine abortion rights in its state constitution? How did the state overwhelmingly approve a minimum wage increase that the people elected to positions of power have resoundingly, repeatedly rejected?

Missouri has had a wide chasm between how it votes for ballot measures and how it votes for candidates for a while now. The year that Missouri replaced its flawed but ultimately pro-labor senator Claire McCaskill with Josh Hawley was the year that voters resoundingly rejected Right to Work legislation that aligned with Hawley’s politics. 

It helps Republicans that they have largely avoided taking public stances on some of their less popular policies. When Donald Trump was asked how he would be voting on Florida’s abortion amendment this year, he evaded the question. Despite a pretty clearly anti-union voting record, Josh Hawley has adopted pro-labor posturing and claimed to be a representative of the working class.

Donald Trump, in nearly a decade as a public political candidate, has consistently run as an oppositional candidate, even when he was the incumbent president. By running as an agitator, it shielded Trump from the single most obvious criticism one could levy at him: a complete lack of actual ideas for how to improve the country. In 2024, his speeches were primarily an airing of personal grievances—anger at the media or at his political rivals, but to the extent that he discussed actual political issues, he criticized Democrats for being soft on border control (while simultaneously strong-arming the party into shutting down bipartisan legislation regarding the southern border), criticizing trans women in sports (while, mercifully, not offering any sort of plan to mitigate this—just kind of plastering photos of some of the most vulnerable people in the country on ads and pointing and laughing), and vaguely saying “The economy” and gesturing wildly with the seemingly correct understanding that this would be enough.

I was not alive the last time a president was replaced with a president of the same political party. The margins of victory in presidential elections have largely narrowed—that a presidential candidate in 1984 won just one state (plus the District of Columbia) seems impossible by modern standards—but the end result of the 1984 election was not a permanent Reagan Republican majority but rather enough of a wave for precisely one more electoral victory before a loss of power.

In 1984, in a story from the world of music but one which intersects more with politics than most, the Bruce Springsteen album Born in the USA was released. Although many of the edges from Springsteen’s previous album, Nebraska, had been sanded off and the production was considerably glossier, it was still a broadly cynical album, most famously through the album’s title track, a (fictional) first-person account of a disenchanted Vietnam War veteran. In the forty years since its release, the song “Born in the USA” has become infamous for its misappropriation in politics—despite Springsteen’s well-known liberal politics and perhaps now billions of “actually ‘Born in the USA’ is about how America is bad, not a lot of people realize that’” takes, it is still used by Republicans as a patriotic anthem. This is its ultimate legacy.

But just because “Born in the USA” is a critique of conservatives does not mean that it is a celebration of liberals—it was Democratic president Lyndon Johnson who escalated American participation in Vietnam, after all. The nameless protagonist of “Born in the USA”, if based loosely on Ron Kovic, almost certainly did not vote for Ronald Reagan, but he probably didn’t vote for Walter Mondale, either. The particulars of 1984 presidential politics were not the resonant theme of the song; cynicism was. A belief that the American Dream, the idyllic world where merely working hard would get one everything they could reasonably expect, was crumbling. Despite Ronald Reagan’s massive Electoral College margins, it wasn’t as though he was universally beloved—Mondale did receive over 40% of the vote—and his “it’s morning in America” optimism was never built to last.

Despite the persistent use of the word “Hope”, Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was, in the broad sense of American politics, cynical. Now, to be clear: I think that cynicism was completelyfounded—when the country has been ruled for eight years by a guy defined primarily by war crimes and a lack of responsiveness to the immediate needs of the American people, you should have a healthy dose of cynicism. Donald Trump’s campaign in 2016 was every bit as cynical, albeit in a way that I found off-putting. Joe Biden, even with all of his hopelessly naïve talk about healing the nation, was fundamentally running on an adversarial message—his primary selling point in the Democratic primaries was not his wealth of experience and certainly was not the specifics of his agenda: it was that he could beat Donald Trump. 

Americans take an odd sense of pride of being unaware of anything outside of our own borders. Single-payer health care or restrictions on individual citizens buying murder machines would not work and we must debate whether this would be the case rather than looking at the many actual, empirical examples around the world demonstrating that they would. But the signs pointed to a strong anti-incumbency sentiment all around the world, because inflation was not a uniquely American problem. Left-wing and right-wing governments were criticized for inflation, which existed no matter what fiscal policies specific governments implemented because inflation was not inherently caused by spending nor austerity but by the fact that the world spent over a year with minimal economic activity around the world because millions of people were dying in a global pandemic. A pandemic that was exacerbated by wildly disproportionate cases in the United States, where the right-wing federal government refused to take proper precautions because they wanted to keep short-term economic indicators looking good. It worked.

Donald Trump will likely get favorable marks on the economy once he takes office because the economy is doing well, just as he did in 2017. And if the second Trump term goes anything like the first one, the Republicans will almost certainly lose in 2028 because Donald Trump doesn’t have any plans. His primary motivation is to stay out of jail. But the ripple effect is going to be massive. Even if Trump’s laziness means that some of his worst plans never come to fruition, he will almost certainly appoint a majority of the United States Supreme Court. That is going to impede progress in the United States for generations.

We are already inundated with a bevvy of incredibly obtuse takes about how Democrats lost the election by capitulating to Never Trump Republicans—the reason Joe Biden dropped out is because he was on track to lose in a landslide, and the fundamentals that led to that never changed. Kamala Harris ran a pretty good, if imperfect, campaign. Donald Trump ran an absolutely terrible campaign, and it did not matter. And as deflating as it is that all sorts of unpopular collateral damage will come as a result of Trump’s re-election, this is simply a visceral reaction to our dissatisfaction less with Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or progressivism, but with the knowledge that the America we were promised is never going to be available for most of us. The result of this anger will be unpopular and destructive, but it’s the result on which we landed.

Until next time.