REISSUE: Is Pop Music Contributing to Our Collective Brain Rot?
Maybe, or maybe not — let's find out.
WHY THIS IS HERE: This is a newsletter about music by LGBTQ+ musicians, and LGBTQ+ identities have been politicized for basically all of recent history — especially now.
WHAT’S THE VIBE? Hopeless and hopeful all at once. Not surprising. It’s 2025!
ADDITIONAL READING: Dozens of stars backed Harris’s campaign and yet she lost. Is the era of celebrity endorsements over? (The Guardian); Vietnam War Protests: Antiwar & Protest Songs (HISTORY)
I feel that this piece didn’t get enough attention when I first published it in February 2025, and it’s about music-related political matters that endlessly fascinate me, so I’m reissuing it today. Lavender Sound will return to its usual every-other-week publishing cadence hereafter — look for our first newsletter from another writer on Thursday, July 10!
In a recent episode of one of my favorite comedy podcasts, Nicole Byer’s Why Won’t You Date Me?, Byer (you might know her from Nailed It!) says she only realized two years ago, that songs have meaning. As in, it took her till age 36 to realize that songs aren’t just fun sounds played on the radio, at stores, in restaurants, and on dancefloors.
Or are they?
Well, sometimes, that’s really all they are. That’s why Byer’s comment (maybe she was saying it ironically or as the silly persona she often puts on in her comedic work) got me thinking about the below tweet I’d seen a few days earlier from user @LizzMurr56, whose display name is the succinct and iconic “America The Ghetto”:
Now, I have my thoughts on whether leftist social media posts really do anything meaningful or valuable to bring about abolition, but that rant is for another day (or DM me. Be not afraid). That said, this tweet got me thinking about the role that pop music (as in, all non-classical music of all genres) does and doesn’t play in our collective brain rot. The subtext of the tweet is clearly that all pop music is stupid now, and that it’s part of the grand canon of this pattern of human behavior that infinitely concerns me and to which I contribute (we all do): We have nice things and creature comforts, so even though things keep getting worse, we still have just enough that we don’t rebel and revolt, and we just keep on working, hanging out, and doing all the same stuff as usual.
I get why some leftists think that pop music is just fodder for brain rot. I like to look at this issue more as a question: What role does, or doesn’t, pop music play in our decades of collectively becoming increasingly unprepared to meaningfully rise up against, and stop, the ongoing intrusion into, and destruction of, our lives by: billionaires, fascism, right-wing vigilantes, capitalism, imperialism, and the U.S. government? All of which are pivotal to institutionalized anti-queerness. Here’s where I’ve landed for now, going phrase by phrase through the tweet.
“Genuinely asking what happened to politics in music?”
I read this as, “Why is so much pop music decidedly apolitical while the world burns, societal collapse is well underway, and our rights are being taken away one by one?” I also interpret this question to really mean “Why isn’t any music political anymore?” and “If we’re in Brave New World instead of 1984, then pop music is surely our soma, right?”
It’s a valid concern. Two of us queer folks’ fave pop girlies of 2024, Sabrina Carpenter and Charli XCX, don’t have a shred of politics in their music despite having such a huge platform that they’re obligated to use it for change. And yet Charli has outright declared her music apolitical. And yet, I still stan.
Of course, the other third big pop girlie of 2024, Chappell Roan, has been very political outside her music, ranging from her generally Free Palestine point of view (the correct POV, I might add) to people completely misinterpreting her fact-based skepticism toward the Democrats as a pro-Trump stance. At the 2025 GRAMMYs, she also used her red carpet time to advocate for trans rights and her Best New Artist acceptance speech to demand healthcare for musicians. SZA has said “Free Palestine” on stage at least twice, and Dua Lipa has denounced the ongoing genocide — which, as I write this, there is or isn’t a ceasefire, it’s unclear because the Zionist state has violated ceasefires before, and even if there were one, a ceasefire isn’t deoccupation and decolonization.
Anyway, maybe these artists’ music isn’t itself political, but it’s not like the artists making it aren’t speaking on these issues. Or, if you’re Paramore, you’re both making music about the power imbalance that lies with men in suits and calling Trump a fascist dictator on stage, and if you’re Kehlani, your whole thing is freeing Palestine, from your social media content down to your music videos. (And after I finished drafting this newsletter, Bad Bunny, arguably the biggest pop artist in the world, dropped his newest album DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, which is often overtly political. The official visualizers, such as this one for the absolute banger “EoO,” are overtly political too!)
As you shift from the mainstream into the more working-class realm of music, you encounter politics both extramusically and in the music itself. Kelela has given pro-Palestine speeches during her live shows. American rock band Deerhoof has been posting about uniting the working class on its Instagram a lot over the last year or so, and its 2017 album Mountain Moves (which includes an Awkwafina feature — the line between mainstream and not is as imaginary as liberal solutions) is rife with explicit working-class politics.
There’s more: Over on TikTok or Instagram Reels (I forget which tbh), last year, British queer folk-punk band Cheap Dirty Horse’s song “On the Rob” went viral for its lyrics “If you make minimum wage, steal from your job every day,” which is a tenet of anarchist thinking and also why it kind of slayed when Winona Ryder got caught shoplifting when I was a kid. And when I interviewed the queer Louisiana rock band Special Interest for an MTV News (RIP) story in 2022, frontperson Alli Logout told me that its music, which has focused on topics including gentrification, isn’t political but is just them observing their surroundings. But as I see it, when those surroundings are in decay, the music becomes political by default.
So, plenty of music is still political, including the album I’m reviewing in the next edition of Lavender Sound [editor’s note: this was published in Februrary 2025, it was our review of Lambrini Girls’ debut album], but you have to dig to find it. If you’re listening to mainstream music, that means actually going to the artist’s live shows or looking at their social media and hoping they say something (or that you catch someone’s video of them saying something, which is how I know about SZA and Kelela taking a stand on stage). As in, you probably won’t hear Top 40 artists calling for a general strike in their lyrics, even if A-list actors like Cate Blanchett are signing letters advocating for the Zionist entity to call a ceasefire and Susan Sarandon is losing her acting career over this. Damn they really hate to see a bitch from Jersey winning. Anyway, zoom out a bit, and you’ll see why politics have mostly been excised from mainstream pop’s lyrical content — but we’ll get there.
“After McCarythism and during it there were countless people who performed on US tv shows against the Vietnam war.”
Toward the end of 2024, it was hard not to hear about Timothee Chalamet’s role as Bob Dylan in the Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown. Dylan broke through with his protest songs, perhaps most notably 1963’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” and he remains a huge subject of public fascination today. So yeah, this part of the tweet holds up at first pass and also when you look deeper. There’s a whole Wikipedia list of anti-Vietnam-war songs by huge names from the era and instances in which this anti-Vietnam rhetoric from musicians crossed over to TV. I can’t quite think of an equivalent today: Who’s disrupting the GRAMMYs for Palestine? [editor’s note: in June 2025, Doechii disrupted the BETs for Palestine and also to protest ICE raids. Our reigning queen]
It was only about a decade ago that Kendrick Lamar drew the (exaggerated-for-TV) ire of famed right-wing doofus Geraldo Rivera with his 2015 BET Awards set. Rivera wasn’t fond of this line from Lamar’s storied “Alright”: “And we hate po-po / Wanna kill us dead in the street for sure.” But Lamar was right, and still is right — in fact, cops killed more people in 2024 than any prior year. And then, the next year, following Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance, which included clear visual allusions to the Black Panther Party and arrived shortly after the Black Lives Matter-referencing video for “Formation” (one of the very best pop songs of all time, we all know this), right-wingers made it into a whole fake controversy again. It’s not that long ago that mainstream musicians were making explicitly political art that crossed over to video and TV.
However, these exact two pop musicians point to how severely politics has been pushed to the side in the mainstream today. Lamar’s 2024 was defined by bashing Drake, and on one hand: A) I’ve always hated Drake with a burning passion and was happy to see him get wrecked; B) yes, remove pedophiles and groomers from positions of power. But beyond the latter, nothing about Kendrick’s legacy-affirming 2024 is particularly political. I would expect someone as patched into how the government and its forces “wanna kill us dead in the street for sure” to at least speak out against the genocide in Palestine. Same goes for Beyoncé, whose music I’ve often loved but who launched her Cowboy Carter campaign at the 2024 Super Bowl, during which the Zionist entity launched an especially intense new bombing spree in Palestine, echoing the leftist observation that the entity often commits its most egregious crimes against humanity while Americans are distracted by major events. It was incredibly disappointing to see Beyoncé participate in this given her established politics (notably, Solange has been very explicitly pro-Palestine).
But honestly, I can’t completely fault either artist, despite Beyoncé being a multimillionaire (a billionaire if you include her cursed husband’s wealth) and Kendrick presumably being one too. Yes, theoretically, they have plenty of insulation protecting them from fallout if they speak out and express views that go against the institutions that govern us. But therein lies the problem: As these institutions’ power has grown increasingly more unchecked from the Nixon era onward, even established artists risk the chance of losing their audiences or legacy to a coordinated smear campaign across the mainstream media. Hell, we saw this with The Chicks in the mid-aughts when they spoke out against the Iraq War, a war that we all now know was a fucking travesty, as are all wars. But The Chicks are still making music, so despite the valid fear, what excuse do millionaire pop artists have?
I guess fear is powerful even when you have plenty of power (I mean, why else would billionaires be so scared of the working class?). In a world in which the digital apartheid persists, actors are fired from major films and dropped by their agencies for pro-Palestinian views, and even minor-ish publications are rescinding pro-Palestine content they originally agreed to greenlight, seemingly untouchable artists must be scared too. After all, we live in an oligarchy, and many major labels and mainstream media publications with music sections are either billionaire-owned or billionaire-funded. It only takes one “wrong” move to be exiled from the system, and that’s scary even if you have enough wealth to live hundreds of lifetimes. But then again, if you have hundreds of lifetimes you can live, shouldn’t you say or do something in this one?
“There were even folk musicians who produced music in support of unions & labor rights which was broadcasted.”
The last part of this is easiest to address: With billionaires owning and funding the media ecosystem — 90% of media in the U.S. is owned by the same six corporations — good luck finding broadcasts that include music in support of unions and labor rights. Even Trader Joe’s, my vice of a grocery store, is working to dismantle the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which is expected to be declared unconstitutional by our right-wing Supreme Court during the second Trump term. Without the NLRB, it becomes much more difficult for unions and working-class people to organize, unionize, and obtain reasonable working conditions. The era described in this part of the tweet is decidedly gone.
As for music of this ilk existing, well, that’s definitely here, as I mentioned earlier. It’s just not in the mainstream. The closest we have to mainstream political music is like if a cat came up to you and told you that it had spent years barking, then decided to write songs about its lifetime spent barking. Would you believe her? Surely, you heard Beyoncé (yes, again, sorry I can have far-left political views and love an artist who’s effectively a billionaire) say “I just quit my job / I'm gonna find new drive / Damn, they work me so damn hard / Work by nine, then off past five” on 2022’s “Break My Soul.” But also just as surely, you heard the internet point out that Beyoncé has never had a job that even remotely resembles a 9-to-5 (though has Dolly Parton? No, I’m asking. Someone tell me). I had a similar thought when SZA finally dropped LANA a couple months back and I heard this lyric on the blurry, woodsy highlight “Diamond Boy (DTM)”: “You make being me less hard / ‘bout to quit my job.” It’s like, girl, what job? You’re working late ‘cause you’re a singer. Love you though — North Jersey icon like myself.
When we approach anything related to the awfulness of jobs in pop music’s subject matter, it’s about as surface-level as putting butter on toast and calling it a full meal. Not that I love the music itself any less, but I’m not listening to it to walk away newly enlightened. I’m listening to it because of the way it makes my mind and body feel, that tingling in my spine and that classic need to just keep replaying a song a whole bunch of times in a row because, well, you just need to. Which brings me to the whole point here (thanks for sticking with me!)...
Music: Is it meaningful?
Well, of course, but you don’t have to go to it for meaning. Nicole Byer not knowing that songs had meaning until two years ago might not sound profound at first but, in a roundabout way, it kind of is. Picture yourself shouting along to M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes” with your friends: You’re shouting along because “Paper Planes” has that energetic, chant-with-me-now energy, and only maybe do you notice that the song is a parody of the anti-immigrant views that are so prevalent in the U.S. — and this song predated the 2024 election by four election cycles! Music has this innate ability to move us, bring us together, give us life, and fill our dullest moments with excitement by the very nature of melody, the human voice, and production. That’s true whether the music is political or not.
Like, can you imagine Charli XCX singing about general strikes and anarchism over the beat to “Sympathy is a Knife”? Didn’t think so — but I also think it’s fair to ponder whether artists whose music itself isn’t political can go the Kehlani route and explicitly speak to our time’s most pressing political causes in their music videos for their apolitical songs. We at once can’t tell musicians how to make their music sound or what to say in it, but under capitalism, all musicians have some amount of platform, and I firmly believe that each and every one of them should use it to spotlight political matters.
Were mainstream artists to more fearlessly use their platforms to spotlight political matters, more people would become aware of issues they don’t yet know about, learn more about matters they care about, and hear about the world’s horrors so often that we might finally break from our soma-like everyday routines and do something about it. Our collective inaction will kill us all, and American life is really just a continuous act of tuning out the world’s horrors and/or numbing oneself to them. So yeah, I have no illusions that writing, speaking out, or anything that we’ve tried for the past 50 to 60 years will liberate us from the horrors of capitalism, imperialism, and government: several ongoing genocides, a doubling of the U.S. homeless population in just one year, endless mass shootings, rampant murders of citizens by police, ICE raids, the list goes on. But if artists do more work to make pop music less of a numbing agent and more of an activating substance, we might just get somewhere. And that might be the meaning of music today.
It would mean a lot to me if you took another quick moment of your day to learn why queer people, and especially queer Jewish people like myself, should care deeply — and never stop talking about — the ongoing genocide in Palestine, via these resources; article from them; mattxiv Instagram slideshow (and two videos if you have more time); Prism piece on pinkwashing and Israel’s anti-queer blackmailing tactics. It would also mean a lot to me if you quickly read about Apple’s exploitation of Congolese people and the ongoing war in Sudan — both of which many also describe as genocides.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Max Freedman launched the LGBTQ+ music newsletter Lavender Sound in January 2025 to create an online writing community by and for LGBTQ+ people about LGBTQ+ music. They also interview artists for The Creative Independent, which is their favorite website (they really want you to read their Jaboukie Young-White interview), and they’ve previously contributed music criticism to Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, and Paste. Their pronouns are whatever float your boat ⛴️💜