It\u2019s almost a year since Donald Trump made a campaign trail appearance on the Hugh Hewitt radio show and made the casual remark that undocumented migrants who commit murder have \u201cbad genes\u201d. It wasn\u2019t his first pronouncement on the subject, of course, but it was blunt enough to make many wonder whether we might be entering a new age of biological determinism and racial hierarchy.<\/p>\n
So when the actress Sydney Sweeney was recently unveiled as the new face of the clothing company American Eagle, her maiden advertisement caused uproar: Sweeney, in repose, is captured wriggling, buttoning, zipping her way into a pair of denims, as she murmurs: \u201cGenes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair colour, personality, and even eye colour.\u201d Some two, three seconds pass. The camera comes to settle on Sweeney\u2019s eyes. \u201cMy jeans are blue,\u201d she says. Off-camera, a male voice provides the tagline: \u201cSydney Sweeney has great genes.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few decades ago, this might not have prompted much consternation. But, in these heightened days, the hiring of a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, registered Republican actor for a campaign that rests on the homophonic tension between \u201cjeans\u201d and \u201cgenes\u201d was unsettling.<\/p>\n
As the debate raged across the media, ranging from the role of indigo in the slave trade to soft eugenics, via the left\u2019s supposed dreary inability to take a joke, Trump posted to Truth Social that Sweeney\u2019s campaign was \u201cThe HOTTEST ad out there,\u201d and took a few additional swipes at \u201cwoke\u201d advertising (Jaguar, Bud Lite) and Taylor Swift (\u201cNO LONGER HOT\u201d). Meanwhile, American Eagle\u2019s stock price surged.<\/p>\n
I mention this story of the actress, the president and the controversial ad campaign in a pop music column because this kind of cultural shift percolates into mainstream society through various means\u2014among them music\u2014and it does so in a way that can be barely perceptible.<\/p>\n
In recent weeks, I\u2019ve thought often about a 2019 article in the New Yorker on the subject of \u201cInstagram Face\u201d\u2014that is, the dominance of a particular aesthetic, evident particularly in the selfie-dominated realm of social media. The magazine described the look as \u201cdistinctly white but ambiguously ethnic\u201d and traced its lineage to an amalgamation of the Kardashians, the Hadids, FaceTune and the cosmetic injector\u2019s office.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve wondered, of course, whether Sweeney\u2019s American Eagle campaign is a riposte to that aesthetic\u2014unambiguously white, with the insistence that her good looks are down to genetics, not clever photo editing or beauty tweakments. And I\u2019ve wondered, too, whether we might inevitably witness something similar in the music world.<\/p>\n
For weeks now, Alex Warren\u2019s \u201cOrdinary\u201d has been the best-selling song in the US. It\u2019s a secular hit wearing spiritual trousers\u2014anthemic, in a vague way, and rich with Christian subtext. Meanwhile, Morgan Wallen has reigned over the album charts, with a 37-track country pop epic that touches on drinking, desire, lost love, gun ownership and the general lunacy of the world right now.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a blurry homogeneity to the sound of both Wallen and Warren. Neither feels distinctive as either songwriter or vocalist; they sound simply white and American\u2014sprawling IHOP\/Waffle House\/gas station songs, simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It feels silly to cite such indistinct music as a marker of cultural change. And yet, its dominance also feels representative of something.<\/p>\n
A mid-year analysis of the Hot 100 charts found country music surging past both rap and pop<\/p>\n
While hip-hop has been the most popular musical genre in the US since 2017, this year, a Billboard mid-year analysis of the Hot 100 charts found country music surging past both rap and pop. To the casual onlooker, country might seem increasingly diverse\u2014last spring, for instance, came the release of Shaboozey\u2019s \u201cA Bar Song (Tipsy)\u201d, which would become the Billboard Hot 100\u2019s joint longest-running number one of all time. It succeeded Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s \u201cTexas Hold \u2019Em\u201d in the number one spot on the country charts, making it the first time two black artists had topped the country charts in consecutive weeks.<\/p>\n
But the truth is less diverse. In 2024, songs by women made up just 8.4 per cent of airplay on country format radio in the US, and 0.1 per cent were songs by black women. Meanwhile, Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s critically acclaimed, platinum-selling Cowboy Carter album\u2014an exploration of Americana focusing on the overlooked contributions of black artists\u2014single-handedly introduced 36m new listeners to the country music genre but stood unnominated at the year\u2019s Country Music Awards. (Wallen, however, scored Entertainer of the Year, his career having somehow righted itself after he was filmed using a racial slur three years earlier.)<\/p>\n
A few weeks earlier, it just so happened that Beyonc\u00e9 also appeared in a denim commercial. A reconjuring of Levi\u2019s infamous 1985 ad featuring Nick Kamen stripping down in a launderette, this new version showed the singer in a pair of white boxer shorts as her jeans spun about in the washing machine. The slogan for this campaign was the word \u201creimagine\u201d\u2014its message that few things are set in stone or predetermined; not musical genres or the path of one\u2019s life; that greatness is there for us all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s almost a year since Donald Trump made a campaign trail appearance on the Hugh Hewitt radio show…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":110589,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[200,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-110588","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-genetics","8":"tag-genetics","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}