For the last couple years I’ve been working on a book about popular music and its impact on culture at large, specifically in the United States in the 20th century. It’s a big topic and I keep going down different rabbit holes, doing more research and educating myself on different subjects, often of a tangential nature. One of the things I’m writing about is the influence of hip hop on American and global culture. I’m Gen X, and so for most of my life I have watched how this thing that started as a novelty in 1970s New York slowly grew into the most popular form of music not only in America but in most of the world. Furthermore, I’ve watched how it has been used, whether consciously or not, as a vehicle to spread ideas through its lyrics and values, and how those ideas have permeated and changed cultures around the world. It seems like a big deal to me, and something that is not fully understood or appreciated, maybe just because I remember what things were like before it happened.
I tweeted recently about some of the roots of rap’s appeal, and I was surprised by the response from zoomers: they called me old and out of touch. “No one,” they told me, “even listens to rap anymore.” Now I’ll be the first to admit that I am old, and out of touch in a Hall and Oates kind of way, but this was news to me. From the little that I pay attention to current musical trends, it seemed to me that hip hop is as strong as ever in popular culture. But in looking at it anew after their comments, it does show signs of being stagnant and on its way out, especially after the Diddy revelations. I’ve become so accustomed to its presence in popular music that I unconsciously just expected it to continue indefinitely, as I keep avoiding it by only listening to music from twenty years ago and older.
I don’t know if this will be the death of rap, never to return like disco before it, or just a lull that will eventually revitalize it later, as has happened repeatedly with rock n’ roll. Regardless, it reflects a bigger change in society and culture that is happening at this moment. As I write this, James O’Keefe just exposed a senior employee at State Farm insurance for engaging in anti-white hiring practices. This sort of thing is hardly new or rare, but what is different this time is that State Farm promptly responded by firing the guy, and specifically repudiating his remarks about race. On the same day that this happened, President Trump addressed Congress and proclaimed the death of DEI by declaring that people are going to be hired based on merit and competence, not race and gender. (If I may take a little victory lap, I correctly pointed out over a year ago that “meritocracy” was the winning strategy to defeat policies of anti-white discrimination.) This statement reflects his Executive Order ending DEI at the federal level. Trump said he would do this, and he did. But what was not expected is that large companies began to follow suit, ending their own DEI hiring policies. They were not ordered to do so, they just did it.
Polling has Trump’s speech with a 75% approval rating among voters. In politics, Trump is a phenomenon, THE phenomenon. In culture, he has become a symbol and a force of nature. There has been a sea change, and while it would not be correct to attribute it entirely or solely to Trump, it would not have happened without him. For Americans and also for many Europeans, Trump is a symbol of liberation and a new optimism, a renewed striving for excellence and achievement rather than “equality” or “equity,” which the last twenty years have shown us always just means mediocrity and stagnation. Trump represents instead the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, that an America in which the best and the brightest are promoted and celebrated rather than held back and discriminated against is ultimately a better America for everyone, except perhaps for those who have become accustomed to nepotism, corruption and graft.
This change has only just begun, and it is far from guaranteed, so I don’t mean to sound overly triumphalist. But I do mean to sound optimistic, which for us GenXers does not come naturally or easily, believe me. For most of my life, I’ve been cynical about politics, and I make no apology for it because I can simply point out what we’ve had before Trump: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama. Clinton signed NAFTA and gave China permanent Most Favored Nation status. Bush got China into the World Trade Organization. After all that I watched American manufacturing get decimated, and the products on American shelves change overwhelmingly to Made in China. (This process had already begun, but now it was on steroids.) Bush also oversaw the catastrophically stupid neocon reaction to 9/11, from which we have still not recovered. Obama continued Bush’s bad policies and often made them even worse, starting new wars and further ruining America’s reputation by reneging on deals and betraying foreign leaders such as Muammar Ghaddafi. He also fomented racial discord at home with his policies and comments, not least of all by deliberately flooding rural and small town America with immigrants from the third world.
During this time, the political and cultural Right was in a sorry state. The most exciting thing was Ron Paul. His campaigns in 2008 and 2012 gave us something to support, but he never had a chance in hell. He’s simply too good of a man and wasn’t able or willing to fight dirty the way you have to fight in Washington D.C. When Trump came along in 2015 and said, “I know the system is corrupt because I use it and take full advantage of it, you need someone like me,” he was exactly right. The story since his election in 2016 is well known and for brevity’s sake I won’t retell it here except to say that in his first term he was still an outsider and faced unprecedented opposition from Democrats and from many in his own party, which was never really his until he made it his, a process which took some time to cement. And so, although his victory in 2016 gave much hope and inspiration, there was also a lot of “Resistance.” A critical mass of people were with him but the cultural institutions were not. Celebrities were afraid to speak out in support of him. Companies were afraid to express any approval of him or his policies, and actively discriminated against employees who were pro-Trump or even just perceived as pro-Trump. Many would-be “respectable conservatives,” many of whom still had blood on their hands from fifteen years of neocon wars that they actively pushed, made “Never Trump” their badge and watchword.
Over the last ten years, beginning with Trump’s campaign announcement in 2015, a counter current has developed. Trump is the figurehead and symbol which has made it possible. With his astounding return to power in 2024, against seemingly impossible odds, the levee has broke. The “Resistance” that caused so much trouble and impeded so much of Trump’s agenda during his first term is exhausted and played out. Celebrities are no longer afraid to be openly pro-Trump. The GOP, to adapt a line from Gladiator, knows that it has been conquered, and most of them have come around and started to wean themselves from their addiction to losing.
MAGA 1.0 from 2016 had boomers as its backbone, and that was the source of many of its strengths and its weaknesses. MAGA 2.0 is a youth movement. The kids who had 2+ years of their lives stolen from them because their parents and grandparents were scared of the flu, who have been told from birth that being white is a sin for which they must somehow atone, that being nice is more important than being right or being the best, have had enough. They get their information from the internet, not the television. They don’t want Disney Marvel superhero movies with lame social justice storylines. And apparently, as they informed me, they don’t listen to rap. (In the 90s Chuck D of Public Enemy said “rap music is CNN for black people.” That became true in ways he could not have predicted.)
Just as I had unconsciously resigned myself to the continued domination of popular music by hip hop, many people had and still have resigned themselves to the continued domination of American (and hence global) culture by the Left. Like conservatives, they have become addicted to losing. But as Jonathan Bowden said, history is full of sudden reversals. Things can change very quickly, and we seem to be in such a moment of reversal now. Trump has shown that you can win against impossible odds. Elon has shown that you can have grandiose ambitions, and actually achieve them—or at least have a lot of fun trying, a lot more fun than your naysaying enemies.
For a long time, most of the art on the Right has been in the vein of Michel Houellebecq—cynical nihilism, often despairing. In a situation without hope, that is as honest as you can be. And sometimes, it’s a necessary antidote to false optimism and cope. But now is no longer the time for that kind of art. We have had enough of it, we have already been blackpilled on everything. What is needed now is art that furthers the momentum and energy towards victory and greatness. Will victory and greatness actually be achieved? No one knows. The doomers who claim to know only know their own self-fulfilling prophecy of their own weakness and irrelevance. To adapt an old saying about love, better to have striven for greatness and fallen short than to have remained a boring curmudgeon, old before your time. Seize this moment—they only come once every hundred years or so. What it means to do that will vary according to the individual: make your art, or create your invention. Form your gang, or take your adventure. Start a business. Make music. Make a movie. Go colonize Africa. A spiritual shackle has been undone; you will have a new wind at your back that previously blew against you. “Can you feel it? The energy has shifted.”
As for myself, I don’t know if I can shake the habit of being cynical—old dog, new tricks and all that. I’m so accustomed to it that I can’t imagine what its absence would be like. But that’s ok, I’ll try to create a new kind of cynical optimism, or cultivate what Nietzsche called a “pessimism of strength.” I will still publish my music book, if I ever finish it, and like any writer I will want people to read it and like it. But I hope that it belongs in the History section rather than Current Events, that its analysis of recent popular music and the damage it has wrought is an autopsy of the pathogen, rather than a diagnosis of an ongoing infection in the patient.