The End of America Has an EDM Remix

Over the last few weeks, as I’ve scrolled through my interminable and often distressing Instagram feed, I’ve repeatedly heard a song that both piques my interest and makes me want to crawl into a hole. It sounds a little like Jelly Roll belting in a bottle-service club, and the first verse goes like this: “We’re in the middle of a hostile government takeover/I wanna talk about it but I’ll be late for work/And if you’re sayin’, ‘Wait a minute, who we have to stop this?’/We had one, but you didn’t want that lady in office.” 

“Hostile Government Takeover (EDM Remix)” is a fun and tossed-off a cappella song first posted by the politically-minded TikToker AGiftFromTodd, then given the piano-house treatment by producer Vinny Marchi. It currently sits at No. 2 on the iTunes Dance Chart—due in part, I assume, to the amount of pro-democracy accounts on social media using it to soundtrack their flyers advertising various protests, but also because it comes off like an SNL digital short. The song is a little bit of a funny surprise on a Reel, but in toto it is kind of stressful thanks to the truth of its lyrics: The U.S. is in the middle of a hostile government takeover! Elon Musk’s federal looting does feel like a “Nigerian prince” scam perpetrated by a random white man! All this shit does make me want to drink!

You can see why the song is so popular Stateside—not just as a stress reliever, but because turning something that looks an awful lot like an oligarchic coup into a dancey little jingle is probably one of the most American things I’ve ever seen in my life. It mirrors the late-capitalist irony that lots of people are leaning into for solace, the sonic equivalent of a million millennials quote-skeeting the latest White House news and typing “we’re cooked” with a cry-laugh emoji on their Bluesky accounts. 

I have listened to this song both willingly and unwillingly many times, and I have come to resent it a little. It feels very 2016, and it also reminds me that EDM itself was propelled greatly by the stewardship of Vegas megaclubs inside casino-hotels—such as the Wynn Las Vegas, owned by the billionaire Steve Wynn, a Trump mega-donor who is currently petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the 1964 Supreme Court decision that protected the media’s ability to report on powerful figures. (I also can’t help but think about how Wynn left his position of Wynn Resorts CEO in 2018, the same year the Wall Street Journal reported that he paid out $7.5 million to a woman he allegedly raped. I’m sure that’s all unrelated!)

But I digress. I love gallows humor. I love AGiftFromTodd’s Jelly Roll-ass voice, and the general “what the fuck is going on?!” creative impulse of his original TikTok. I also think the popularity of “Hostile Government Takeover” reflects peoples’ desire for mainstream protest music that isn’t shitty, a problem that U.S. culture has been dealing with since at least the George W. Bush administration. “Hostile Government Takeover” isn’t preachy, it’s just the feelings of one man making a ditty in the moment about something that many of us can relate to; it is the opposite of heavy-handed political music that is useful in its message but not overly successful as art. 

It is also filling a void of mainstream popular music speaking to the moment right now (aside from, I guess, Macklemore). I also think the political-music void is why so many people have lost their minds over A Complete Unknown, an entirely serviceable movie that, cast with less-famous actors, would have made more sense as a popcorn biopic on VH-1. Sure, boomers looking to relive their era ate it up, as did Club Chalamet (shout out Club Chalamet). But at least some of the movie’s success was because it speaks to a certain desire for a pop-culture lion whose protest tunes can truly galvanize; unfortunately, between 1965 and now, market pressures, the stratification of culture, and the demonization of too many federally protected (for now) groups of people have made that unlikely. 

But I hope I’m wrong. And what if AGiftFromTodd is the new Bob Dylan? And TikTok is the new Newport Folk? In this weird and fucked-up world, it would make a kind of sense.