Noah Kahan and Pop’s Beta-Male Backlash Against Trumpism

Embarrassing confession time: I am utterly fascinated by Noah Kahan. I first encountered him via Olivia Rodrigo’s cover of his hit “Stick Season” last fall, and since then have followed his ballooning career with bafflement and wonder. Here’s a guy who should be about as popular as perfectly innocuous songwriter dudes like James Bay or George Ezra or Dermot Kennedy, all of whom Kahan has opened for. (If you’re asking “who?”... exactly.) And yet, there he is with a Best New Artist Grammy nomination, on Saturday Night Live, headlining festivals around the world, and selling out Fenway Park two nights in a row.

A quick primer on the Kahan-omenon for the unfamiliar: Guitar-playing singer-songwriter from New England gets signed to a major label in 2017, at age 18, releases two albums that do OK, tours relentlessly, becomes really good at self-deprecating social media posts. Then the pandemic happens, he moves back to rural Vermont and starts writing songs about his hometown. He posts clips on TikTok and they go viral. He puts out his third album, Stick Season, in October 2022. Over the course of the next two years, it snowballs into a commercial juggernaut. As of July, it was the third-biggest-selling album of 2024, behind only Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen, and ahead of Beyoncé. The title track now has over 1.2 billion plays on Spotify. 

Lyrically, Kahan focuses on mental health struggles and small-town restlessness. He’s depressed in a comforting, curl-up-on-the-couch-and-watch-Gilmore Girls way, not a scary, razor-blades-and-pills way. Live, he introduces his songs by saying things like, “This next song is about Zoloft, and if you came to this show, I highly consider you take it.” He founded a mental health nonprofit and talks openly about his struggles with depersonalization and disordered eating. 

Sonically, he follows in the tradition of folk-adjacent indie guys (Bon Iver, Sufjan) and stomp’n’holler cringe (Mumford, Lumineers). But his commercial explosion over the past year has catapulted him well beyond their ranks. He now finds himself in a class with Ed Sheeran and Coldplay: nondescript white guys playing stadiums to intergenerational audiences. (Kahan’s joking reference to himself as “the Jewish Ed Sheeran” from a few years ago has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.) But why? Why Noah Kahan, of all people, and why now? This perplexed me for months. 

Then Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz to be her running mate, and suddenly it all made sense.

Hear me out: Kahan and the Governor of Minnesota have a lot in common. They both love dogs, Taylor Swift, and the outdoors. (Their shared penchant for flannel was even highlighted in an Instagram post by the Harris campaign, which was subsequently shared by Kahan himself.) They’re both buds with Bernie Sanders. They both brought their families on stage this summer for the biggest performances of their lives. But most of all, Kahan and Walz are both Nice White Men of the Left, proud beta males wrapping progressive values in down-home trappings like an L.L. Bean vest snuggled inside a Carhartt jacket.

If Walz is Everyone’s Dad, then Kahan is Everyone’s Hometown Boyfriend. He offers a fantasy for the whole family: Dad wants to slap him on the back with proud tears in his eyes and say, “Son, I thought they didn’t make ’em like you anymore.” Mom wants him to marry her daughter. Daughter whispers, “Maybe I can fix him…” and dreams about braiding his hair. Son bawls in parasocial ecstasy over their psychic connection via shared forms of anxiety.

After the past several years of unrelenting chauvinism at the hands of the white male patriarchy, as personified by Trump, Vance, Musk, Tate, and all the destruction they have wrought (Dobbs, the mainstreaming of incel culture, the deification of the tradwife, the attacks on LGBTQ rights, etc. etc. etc. to infinity), a whole lot of women and queer people—and really anyone who doesn’t like being told what to do by a white guy—have increasingly limited patience for bros in their music, too. If daily life is a full on assault of testosterone, some of us just aren’t really into a Morgan Wallen or a Post Malone bellowing at us in our headphones. “I Had Some Help,” Wallen and Posty’s inescapable summer mega-hit, is basically a victim-blaming, anti-accountability rant: “It ain’t like I can make this kinda mess all by myself/Don’t act like you ain’t help me pull that bottle off the shelf.” Meanwhile, Noah Kahan is over here pulling the rug out from under all that bullshit: “It’s half my fault, but I just like to play the victim,” he sings on “Stick Season.”

For the most part, the desire to take a sonic vacation from toxic masculinity in 2024 has manifested in the utter domination of the mainstream music brainspace by pop girlies. Other than a brief break this spring for the Drake-Kendrick dick-measuring contest, the year’s music discourse was pretty much all Beyoncé, Taylor, Charli, Chappell, Sabrina, and/or Billie, all the time. While there have been plenty of successful men on the charts this year, it has mostly felt like the boys are playing in the minor leagues. Sure, Shaboozey and Tommy Richman and Teddy Swims and Benson Boone were immovable presences on the Hot 100 all summer, but do they have stans? Do fans get tattoos of their song lyrics? Do they even have more than one song?

Kahan’s tide has risen in tandem with that of many other fellow nice white guys, including Coldplay, who recently scored their first U.S. No. 1 album in a decade, and Justin Vernon, one of Kahan’s biggest influences, who came out of hibernation with a new Bon Iver EP a couple of weeks ago to remind us all who’s the true king of small-town indie folk. (“Can’t wait to listen to this new bon iver and look out a window for a while,” Kahan tweeted in late September.) And then there’s Hozier, the earthy Irish balladeer whose cult following has steadily grown since he first broke through with “Take Me to Church” 10 years ago. This spring, he topped the Hot 100 with his song “Too Sweet.” Despite being a straight man, Hozier is particularly popular among queer women. “Lesbians love Hozier,” Lucy Dacus said in a New York Times piece about the phenomenon this summer. “His songs are so poetic and heartfelt, and they’re about yearning in a way that seems really genuine.” Hozier collaborator Allison Russell added that queer fans like him because he’s “a grown male who is radically loving, accepting, open, and a tremendous, tremendous ally.” 

At this point, Noah Kahan is maybe the least problematic super famous white guy on the charts. Google “Noah Kahan canceled” and the only results are about a Wisconsin show called off due to a storm. Google “Noah Kahan controversy” and the only results are about a time he got in trouble for a piece of merch that accidentally referred to Dublin as being part of the UK. He isn’t a nepo baby or an industry plant, he hasn’t said anything stupid about any hot-button issue, hasn’t complained too much about being famous, hasn’t been accused of anything untoward. He seems to really truly love his family, his hometown, his dogs, and his fans. His only haters seem to be people who find his music boring, annoying, cringey, or all three. 

But really, how long can it last? Inevitably, something will come along and shatter this snow globe of goodwill. Too many times, we’ve seen the front of the “nice guy” singer come crashing down in spectacular fashion, revealing the toxicity bubbling underneath. Right now though, in these exasperating final days before the election, I’m grasping at any and all strands of positivity left in this world. I’m choosing to believe that Noah Kahan really is a stand-up dude, just like I’m choosing to believe that Tim Walz really is the loving-but-stern dad who can talk some sense into America and make her stop being such a bully to all the other kids on the playground. Because in times like these, I’ll take whatever hero I can get.