His most recent piece for Compact was titled -- no, I'm not making this up. "The Revolutionary Significance of Trump’s White House UFC Fight." So you can see why the Times thinks he really has his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist. (Do I need to add an /s here?)
The headline of his piece in the Times today is "Ella Langley. ‘Landman.’ The Rural Vibe Shift Is Real."
There is a paradox at the heart of American pop culture. The United States, in recent years, has never had a higher share of foreign-born residents, and it has never been more racially and ethnically diverse. Yet forms of entertainment that are associated with an older, whiter, more rural America — notably, country music and TV westerns — are thriving, even dominating.Let me stop you right there, Matt. These "forms of entertainment that are associated with an older, whiter, more rural America" are thriving, but outside the world of pop music, they're not dominating -- and it's debatable how dominant country music is right now.
This is certainly noteworthy:
Ella Langley’s song “Choosin’ Texas” has spent 21 weeks atop the Billboard charts....And:
In the first week of August, for the first time ever, the top five songs on the Hot 100 were country singles. Even Taylor Swift’s latest release, a generically poppy tune tied to the movie “Toy Story 5,” has been marketed as a country song — an apparent acknowledgment that there are advantages to identifying with the genre she left behind in 2014.But the only album to spend four weeks at #1 on Billboard's album chart this year was by Drake. The only artists to spend three weeks at #1 are BTS and Noah Kahan. Langley and Morgan Wallen have spent two weeks at the top this year, but so has Taylor Swift (with Life of a Showgirl, which is not country), and so have Harry Styles and Olivia Rodrigo.
Schmitz continues:
According to Nielsen’s multi-platform ratings, four of the top 10 TV shows this season are westerns or neo-westerns such as “Landman” and “Dutton Ranch.”But the most popular show of the year, far surpassing any of these oaters, is Stranger Things, which is in no way a Western or neo-Western. In second place is His & Hers, a Netflix mystery series set partly in rural Georgia, but focused on a biracial couple. That matters because Schmitz wants you to believe this alleged rural boom is all about whiteness:
As diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives accord advantages to everyone except straight white men; as globalization and an urban, knowledge-based economy have impoverished and emptied out rural communities; and as trust in institutions including higher education and the federal government declines, the culture of rural working-class whites can symbolize an unconstrained way of life that stands apart from the stifling, all-encompassing H.R. bureaucracy that everyone else lives in.Meanwhile, on streaming services, there's no evidence whatsoever of this Western boom.
The real argument of this essay is that Donald Trump might be a miserable failure, but conservative dominance of America is unchecked.
Much discussion of the so-called vibe shift of 2024 centered around Mr. Trump. Today, his sagging poll numbers — dragged down by headlines about Jeffrey Epstein, Iran and the economy — may be read as a sign that the vibe has shifted back. Politically speaking, that appears to be true. But the rural surge suggests that in broad cultural terms, the country continues to trend right.Is the success of Stranger Things or The Last House right-coded? I don't think so. As for music, country might be thriving because it continues to embrace satisfyingly basic pop song structures, at a time when hip-hop rarely does and there's no energy left in rock apart from eccentric acts like Geese and Angine de Poitrine, or abrasive, laryngitis-inducing metal. Noah Kahan, Taylor Swift, and Olivia Rodrigo write old-fashioned songs, and they're hugely popular (and all politically left-leaning). Maybe verse-choru-verse songs are what Americans want, not social conservatism.
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